Contaminated?
It was as good a word as any to describe the way he felt.
God damn those eggheads and their excavation. They'd brought all this upon him; they'd started it all.
And Melanie was one of them. That was the ironic part.
He looked down at the biggest shard of pottery. It had shown a full-length view of their house and yard, but now the house depicted was Brian Babbitt's, next door. He touched the other shards and saw Babbitt kneeling in front of a hole in the ground, saw him placing something indistinct on a table, saw him smiling broadly at a small hand without fingers.
What could it mean?
George glanced from one piece of pottery to another, trying to follow the painted images as though they were panels in a comic strip, but they didn't make any narrative sense. This was the first time he'd seen a picture of anyone outside of his family--except for the Weird Man, of course--and he didn't know what it meant.
"George!"
He quickly picked up the pottery shards and shoved them back in the drawer. What the hell was Margaret doing home so soon? The stupid bitch must have forgotten something and come back for it. She was supposed to be at the grocery store, and usually that meant he had at least a full hour to himself.
"George!"
He locked the drawer, pocketed the key, and hurried across the den, opening the door. "What is it?" he called down the hall.
Margaret poked her head around the corner. "That red light came on again. You forgot to fill up the gas tank and now we're almost out. I don't want to run out halfway across town and have to call you or walk."
He closed the den door. "Let me look at it."
"There's nothing to look at. The light's on and it stays on. I want you to go get some gas first before I drive anywhere."
"Give me the keys."
As he walked past Margaret, she handed him the keys, and he went out to the car, opened the driver's door, and got in. He inserted the key in the ignition, but did not turn on the engine. He tapped the clear plastic window covering the speedometer, pretending to be looking at something, then stepped out of the car. "You have two gallons left," he told her. "This baby gets twenty-eight miles per gallon. You could go fifty-six miles on what you have in there."
"But--"
"Stop at the gas station on your way if it makes you feel any better. But you could drive all around town twice, come home, and I'd still have enough to go out tomorrow."
Margaret looked relieved.
That was one thing that could be said for Melanie and women of her generation: they weren't dumb enough to fall for something as stupid as that.
Right now he was glad his wife was, however. He had decided that he needed to go next door and see Brian Babbitt, and he wanted her out of here. He didn't care if she ran out of gas at IGA and had to hoof it back. He wanted to make sure she would be gone for some time.
Why?
What was he planning to do?
He didn't know. But he wanted to be on the safe side. Just in case.
Margaret got in, started the car, and backed out of the driveway. She waved to him before putting the vehicle into drive and heading down the street. He waved back and stood in place until the car turned the corner.
Then he walked next door to Babbitt's.
He hadn't been over to his neighbor's house for a long time. He didn't know why, wasn't sure when the friendship had slipped back into acquaintanceship, but he realized when he saw the dead patchy lawn, the dusty, unwashed front windows, the trail of garbage on the driveway, that it had been quite a while since he'd been here or even looked over here. When Winnie had been alive, the four of them had socialized quite often, but recent contact had been limited primarily to greetings over the hedge as one or another of them came home or left.
The picture on the pottery had looked more like the old Babbitt place, the way it had been in Winnie's day, the way he thought of it in his mind, and for the first time he wondered if he was dreaming those pictures or imagining them. Maybe they were all in his mind and if he showed them to someone else, that person would see nothing unusual or out of the ordinary.
No.
The pictures were there.
And they kept changing.
George moved up the dirty driveway, then across a short cement walk to the stoop. He was about to ring the bell when the door suddenly opened and Brian Babbitt stood there in the darkness of the unlit foyer, wearing nothing but his glasses. The old man's nudity should have shocked him, but he had no reaction to the sight of that wrinkled sunken chest, those shriveled dangling genitals. When Babbitt motioned for him to enter, George walked inside.
If the outside of the house had changed, the inside was unrecognizable. In the living room, the furniture was gone, the carpet torn up. Where the furniture had been, on the bare cement floor, were beads and small stone carvings, hundreds of them, arranged in a round pattern that seemed familiar to him, but that he could not quite place. Babbitt hurried past him, sat down hard on the floor, and began to move several carvings, scooting one fat women catty-corner, sliding a deer atop a trio of turquoise beads. He looked like a kid playing with army men, and he picked up a nasty little figurine, a demon or monster of some sort, and held it to his ear, nodding periodically as though the stone object were whispering to him.
He put down the figurine, smiled at George. "That's how I knew you were coming," he said. "They told me."
It was the first thing either of them had said, but that didn't matter. They didn't really have to speak. They understood each other.
They suffered from the same obsession, George thought, and briefly it occurred to him that what they were doing was wrong.
Then he looked down at all the beads and carvings and felt a calmness settle over him. He was impressed with the sheer number of objects Babbitt had found, and he wondered if the old man had started searching in other places besides his own backyard.
George cleared his throat. "I've been finding pottery," he said. "That's how I knew you were in here."
Babbitt nodded and picked up a small carved horse, placing it on the outside of the circle. He stood, and George noticed without interest that he had an erection. "Come here," Babbitt said. "I want to show you what I found."
George followed him around the bar and counter into the kitchen. Some of the living room furniture was here: a lamp and end table smashed against the side door that led into the garage, a rickety bookshelf set on the counter next to the sink, touching the ceiling. Babbitt walked up to the refrigerator. The door was off its hinges and nowhere in sight, and the fridge was empty save for a strange black form that looked like a mummified animal.
"What is it?"
"I think it was a cat."
George stared at the dark wrinkled object with admiration and envy. This was a find. He had only unearthed pieces of pottery and a couple of arrowheads. Nothing like this.
"You can eat it. It tastes like beef jerky." Babbitt picked up a steak knife lying on the refrigerator shelf next to the cat and sliced off a thin piece from the mummified animal's back. He handed it to George, cut a piece for himself. "Try it. It's good."
George smelled the dried meat, then put it to his lips and nibbled on a minuscule portion. It wasn't bad. He put the whole thing into his mouth and chewed. Pretty good, really. Kind of tasted like beef jerky. Teriyaki beef jerky.
"To tell you the truth, I don't even know what made me think of trying it in the first place, but it seems like I've been craving lots of weird food lately. I don't know if my tastes are changing or what." Babbitt glanced around as if afraid of being overheard and leaned forward conspiratorially. "Every try child fingers?"
"Child fingers?"
"The fingers of children. They're surprisingly tasty."
"No, I can't say that I have."
"You should." Babbitt placed the steak knife back on the refrigerator shelf.
George looked out the kitchen window, saw only the indistinct form of his own hous
e and poplar tree through the filthy translucent glass. He glanced back toward the living room and the army of carvings arranged in the round pattern.
"What's coming next?" he asked.
Babbitt stroked the head of the mummified cat and smiled. "I don't know," he said. "but whatever it is, it's big."
3
Eric Jackson no longer slept with the lights on.
He didn't know when he had stopped. But after he had thrown the arrowhead in the lake, he had found more. And more. And more. Every time he stubbed his toe, it seemed, he was uncovering another arrowhead. At first he'd left them where he found them. Then he tossed them into the garbage can in the garage. Somewhere along the way, however, they had ceased to frighten him. He had become intrigued with their differences and peculiarities, with the variances in size and shape and technique and materials. They had grown in number upon the bureau in the living room, taking the place of his geode collection, and in a transition so smooth he hadn't noticed it, he had stopped sleeping with the lights on.
Eric sat on the cold cement floor of the garage, fitting a chiseled obsidian tip into a bamboo spear of his own making. He'd stolen the bamboo from the Yamashitas' yard, and he planned to try it out this morning, see how well bamboo worked. He'd made over thirty spears, from different wood and branches, and he kept track of how well they flew, how accurate their aim, how strongly they hit, in a small green notebook he kept in his toolbox. Only three had been out-and-out failures, and those he'd destroyed, retaining the arrowheads for reuse. The rest lay stacked against the back wall of the garage, waiting.
Waiting for what?
He didn't know yet. But he would know when the time came.
He finished the bamboo spear and took it to the backyard, where he spent the next hour throwing it at a series of targets and meticulously recording the details of each throw. The bamboo was light and aerodynamically sound, and while the tapered end broke off twice and the spear did poorly on all of the strength tests, it flew, and Eric decided to get a larger length of bamboo and try again.
The Yamashitas' bamboo was all small. They'd planted it only five years ago, when they'd moved to Bower. He'd already taken their biggest piece, and he tried to think of someplace else in town or in the county that might have bamboo.
The park.
He locked up the house and drove his pickup to the east end of town, parking in the lot next to the playground. Between the playground and the baseball diamond were the biking and running trails, the pond and stream, the area with the heaviest non-native foliage. If there was any bamboo to be found, it would be here.
Eric grabbed a pair of clippers from the toolbox in the bed of the pickup and walked past the swings, past the slide, past the jungle gym, onto the dirt path that led into the heart of the park. He kicked a potato chip wrapper into the water as he passed over the small bridge that spanned the stream. Luckily, the park was empty. No kids were playing on the equipment, the paths appeared to be empty and he heard no noise from the athletic fields. If he did find some bamboo, no one would see him steal it.
The brush grew thicker, and he slowed his pace, stopping to look behind a copse of cattails, peering between two tall camilia bushes at a batch of reeds at the edge of the pond. The path dipped, curved right. He didn't see anything that looked remotely like bamboo ahead of him and was about to turn back and try one of the forking side tails he'd passed, when he saw--
Feet.
There was a body in the bushes, short legs and small tennis shoes protruding from beneath a leafy, low-hanging branch. Eric stopped, stared, and waited to see if there was movement. When he saw no motion, heard no noise, he stepped carefully forward and lifted the branch.
A boy of about four or five had been killed and dropped off here in a sloppy attempt to hide the body. He was wearing cutoff jeans and a yellow Elmo tanktop. Eric could see marks of a rope around the child's neck, eyes bulging from a bloated strangled face. The kid's fingers were missing; they'd been chopped off.
What surprised Eric was not that the kid's body had been dumped here, but that it had not been stripped. Weren't the killers of young boys usually pervs?
Eric bent down to examine the body more carefully, though he didn't know what he expected to find. He was not horrified but strangely intrigued. There was no blood on the ground, despite the missing fingers, although a trickle of dried white spittle on a purplish puffy cheek led to a brackish puddle on an oversize leaf.
Eric suddenly realized he was hungry. His stomach was growling. Was someone barbecuing? Something smelled good--
The boy.
Eric frowned, then leaned closer, sniffed the skin of the child's arm. Yes, that was it. The kid smelled like . . . chicken.
Barbecued chicken sounded great right now. He'd been so absorbed in making and testing his bamboo spear that he'd forgotten to eat lunch. Now he was so hungry that he could barbecue the boy and eat him.
Barbecue the boy . . .
He pinched the kid's forearm, felt meat under the skin.
Why not barbecue him?
There was something wrong with that logic, Eric thought, but he could not remember what it was. Besides, such petty concerns were swept aside by what had grown into a monumental hunger. Damn! He was starving! He could not remember ever having been so famished, and he stood, looking up and down the path, listening for noises. The park still seemed to be empty.
Quickly, before he could change his mind, he squatted down and picked up the boy's body. It was heavier than he'd thought it would be, and he struggled to his feet. He didn't like cradling the kid in his arms, didn't like looking into those bulging eyes, and he shifted position, holding on to the legs and throwing the head and torso over his shoulder. He felt wetness through his shirt, but he didn't care, and he walked quickly back the way he'd come, smelling the sweet scent of fresh flesh.
At home, he stripped the body, washed it with the backyard hose, and tenderized the meat, stabbing it with a fork and then dousing the boy with barbecue sauce.
The Weber wasn't big enough, but he had a barrel barbecue, a homemade contraption the previous owner of the house had left behind. He dragged it from beneath the jungle of interlaced spiderwebs on the fence side of the storage shed to the center of the backyard. He swept it out with a broom, filled it with charcoal and a few dried mesquite branches, splashed lighter fluid over everything, and set a match to it.
An hour later, the coals were ready. The boy had been marinating on the patio table, and Eric lifted him by one foot and one hand and placed him on the grill, gratified to hear sizzling. There was a slight flare of flames as the kid's hair burned off.
He stood next to the barbecue, watching.
Damn, the food smelled good.
Turning would have been tough, but he had an old pair of asbestos gloves in the garage, and he used them to lift the boy's body and awkwardly flip it over. By this time, the eyes had melted and blackened and no longer appeared to be staring. Dark grill marks slashed horizontally across what had been the face, making it look like an oddly shaped steak, and Eric mused that this could just as easily be a pig.
Long pig, he thought. And chuckled.
He used the asbestos gloves twice more, making sure nothing burned but everything was cooked. When it looked like it was done, he took a fork and peeled off a section of thigh, blowing for a second on the steaming meat and then placing it in his mouth and chewing it.
Juicy.
Good.
Still chewing, he walked into the kitchen, came back with a plate and a carving knife. He looked down at the cooked brown carcass and smiled.
Chow time.
4
Cameron woke up early, knowing something was wrong.
He didn't know how he knew but he did, and before he left his room, he got dressed, putting on his pants and shirt and shoes and socks rather than ambling out to the kitchen barefoot in his pajamas. He wanted to be ready to flee the house. Just in case.
He heard his parents
talking in the kitchen, but when he went in, the room was empty. There were empty bowls and glasses on the placemats, Cheerios and milk and orange juice in the middle of the table, but his mom and dad were nowhere in sight. He walked out to the family room carefully, ready for anything. "Mom?" he said hesitantly. "Dad?" They weren't here either. Nor in the living room, their bedroom, either of the bathrooms, or the garage. He opened the sliding glass door and went outside, checking the backyard, the side yards, the front yard. Nothing. The cars were still here, but his parents weren't, and he stood on the front lawn, wondering what he should do. Check the neighbors' houses, call the police?
He walked across the street to Jay's.
Jay's parents would help him. He couldn't count on anyone else. Mr. Green, Mrs. Dilbay, Mr. Finch, all of the other people on the block seemed to have changed since Stu's dad had been killed. They were weird, hostile, as though blaming Jay for the actions of his dog and blaming Cameron for being his friend. But Jay's family was still normal, and he knew they'd help him find his parents.
He stepped up the curb, walked over the lawn, and slowed as he looked up at the house.
The front door was open.
Wide open.
That didn't mean anything. Bear was gone so they didn't have to worry about the dog running away. There was no reason they had to keep the door closed. Probably Jay's dad had carried groceries into the house and both of his hands had been full and he hadn't been able to close the door behind him. He'd probably be coming out any second to shut it.
Carrying in groceries? At seven o'clock in the morning?
Cameron stepped gingerly up to the front door, peering inside. The interior of the house was dark, silent.
He didn't want to go in, but he had to, and he stepped slowly over the threshold, holding his breath. There was no noise, not even the hum of a refrigerator or the sighing of toilet pipes, and when Cameron finally exhaled, his breath sounded as loud as a shout.
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