Crossroads (15 page)

"Sheila, save me!" screamed Marguerite.    

Frozen by nightmare paralysis there was nothing Sheila could do. She remained in a small cone of mysterious golden light and called and called, but after that one cry her mother said no more. Then slowly the light around Sheila faded, and although she turned in every direction, searching for a way out, knowing that the monster that had taken her mother was back for her, and there was nothing at all that she could do because to do anything at all would turn her into a bigger monster than the one hidden in the shadows. She would become a freak, even worse than her mother.    

Voices whispered around her, and she knew that if she listened, if she really
listened they held an answer to her plight, but she also knew that to do so was to give up her soul forever.

"I don’t hear you!" she screamed, covering her ears.

The voices were so insistent they seemed to have weight, like a million tiny fingers stroking her skin, clutching, drawing her to them, pulling her hands away to make her listen. When one of the voices drew nearer it was masculine and deep, and she struggled to put a name to it because the sound of it was somewhere on the periphery of her memory. She knew that voice.

"I didn’t want it to happen," it said, with such deep sadness and regret that Sheila felt cut to the bone by empathic grief. "God help me. I didn’t want it to happen."

But there was no face, just more darkness and deeper shadows with more murmuring voices.

"Who are you?" Sheila called, her voice echoing as though down a deep shaft.

The answer might have been a terrible sigh, or it might have been nothing more than the soughing of the wind, but she
needed
to put a face to it. It was incredibly important that she know who the speaker was, but struggle as she might she could not part the shroud of shadows between them. Finally a face did begin to form out of the surrounding curtains of darkness. Gray matter clung to a flap of bone and skin dangling from the back of the man’s head, but Vern Billings seemed to feel no pain. Why should he? He was dead after all.

"I didn’t mean for it to happen," he wailed.

"There’s nothing I can do for you," muttered Sheila, backing into more greedy shadows.

But Vern followed, his face glowing like a jack-o-lantern in the gloom. Cold hands gripped her wrists, and she could not jerk away as he leaned so close that she could smell the sick sweet embalming fluid on his breath.

"I loved them. You have to believe me."

"You murdered them," gasped Sheila.

"But it wasn’t like that," insisted Vern. "I wanted to protect them. I didn’t want them to have the nightmares anymore. I didn’t want to have the nightmares anymore."

"I don’t want to have the nightmares anymore, either!" she shrieked, tugging fiercely to escape.

Finally the dream released her to sweat soaked wakefulness. Climbing wearily from bed she threw on her robe and plopped onto the living room sofa, snatching up the television remote, then tossing it away in disgust. The dream had exhausted her as though she had just spent the past four hours actually running after her mother, trying to protect her, fighting with Vern, instead of lying in her bed, safe at home. Her own mind had conspired against her, and she knew that she could not do what it took to cleanse herself of either her guilt or her stubbornness.

All it would take would be admitting that there was something to what her mother said and that both her powers and her own mother were real. She didn’t have to become a true believer about
everything
, just something like an agnostic regarding her mother’s beliefs, but she couldn’t accept that. She had taken too much abuse over the years. Her psyche had been permanently damaged by ridicule to the point at which even to admit that her mother might have a point was beyond her. As ridiculous as it might sound to an
outsider,
even though she might or might not speak on a regular basis to the dead, Sheila was an adamant realist when it came to witchcraft, Ouija boards, Tarot, or anything she could not see or touch. The last thing in the world she needed at the moment was to allow herself the slightest crack in her armor. Dreams be damned. Her mother be damned. She wasn’t really there.

Only Sheila refused to give her up.

Stop the insanity. You can’t keep going out to the house and talking to yourself. Sooner or later someone is going to find out. Then they’re going to lock you up.

Out of the blue an odd sense of foreboding struck, and she stared at the phone certain it were about to ring, but when it didn’t she breathed a sigh of relief. Her mother had never called since her death, of course, and
whoever
had been on the line the other day, Sheila was certain she did not want to talk to them again.

She considered climbing into her car and driving out to the house again, but even if she was hallucinating, her image of her mother would try to convince her of something silly. Maybe her
spirit guides
were the ones causing the dreams, keeping her up. If she was insane it was ridiculous the way her own mind could mimic her mother so realistically, but she had to admit that in some ways it was a comforting madness, and she knew that her loneliness was a major part of why she clung to it.

She went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. She wasn’t going back to sleep, and by noon caffeine was going to be the only fuel keeping her going. She popped an antacid from a roll beside the drainer and wracked her mind for a way out of the miasma her life had become.

Through the veil of scrub at the edge of the danger-filled forest a highway loomed, moon-greased and hardly welcoming. As Kira peered out of the shelter of trees, she could hear the clicking all-too close behind them, and the outskirts of one more town just up the road looked to be the only way they could run. She could feel daylight approaching like a soft, golden promise, but she knew that she and Jen might well be dead before dawn could rear its head. If the Grigs completely surrounded them even Jen’s invisibility trick probably wasn’t going to fool them for long.

"We can’t go there," she whispered, nodding toward the town.

Jen studied her with her usual indifference. "Why not?"

"Because there’s people there," insisted Kira. "We can’t lead the Grigs to them."

Jen shrugged. "The Grigs will go there if they please."

"No, they won’t. They’ll follow us."

"Not if they can’t find us," Jen reminded her.

Kira bit her lip, sensing the logic. Jen might be able to shield them from the Grig’s once again, maybe... but then where would they go? What would they do? They
might
go into the town anyway, and once there, all hell might break loose.                                

"Where would you rather go?" asked Jen.

Kira sighed. That was just it. The forest behind them was loaded with Grigs and maybe even the
Empty-eyed-man
. Across the highway a wide expanse of fields carpeted in waist-high tobacco flowed away to the horizon. They couldn’t chance that. Their only shelter seemed to be amid the houses and shops of the village. When a couple of clicks sounded in the brush only feet behind them, she crept out of the trees and hurried down the road with Jen still clutching her hand.

Even wide awake the damned dream wouldn’t let Sheila go. Vern’s voice continued to echo in her head, but it was the image of her mother, being dragged away into the dark, calling Sheila’s name, shouting to be saved that hurt. There was something eerily real about it that not only hammered at her disbelief but rent her with illogical guilt.

That was stupid.

There were no monsters, no evil darkness waiting to suck innocents into some shadowy hell. Either her mother was dead and gone and nothing but dust, or she was real, existing merrily  in all her ghostly glory, but she wasn’t in heaven, and she damned sure wasn’t in hell. If there was a hell, it was here and now. That she could believe. She thought of the killings at the Billings house and shook her head. She was on her fourth coffee already, and when she set her cup and saucer on the counter they rattled. Great. By the time she opened the diner she was gonna be a basket case with a tension headache, exhaustion from lack of sleep, and bleary eyes to boot. Maybe a shower would help. She was headed for the bathroom when the sound of trash cans crashing onto the driveway stopped her. The neighbor’s damned dog again. She jerked open the front door only to find herself staring at an unlikely pair of people, not canines.

"Hey!" she shouted, as the young girl and her sweatshirt-clad companion continued on down the drive, leaving garbage strewn in their wake.

"Hey!" she called again, hurrying down the stoop when the pair didn’t halt.

Finally the young girl stopped, and the woman pulled up short only because she was clutching the girl’s hand. When they both turned Sheila was shocked by the fear in the girl’s face and by the odd, dead eye of the woman. She strode toward them, but the girl seemed much more concerned with something behind Sheila. Sheila whirled, and for just an instant she thought she caught a glimpse of something dark, the size of large fat labrador, slinking off behind her trailer.

"Please go back inside," pleaded the girl, who appeared to be twelve or so.

Sheila glanced at the woman, but something told her that any answers would come from the girl.

"Not after you knocked over my garbage," she said. "Now who are you, and what are you doing nosing around my house at this hour?"

"Please," said the girl. "You’re in danger right now."

"From what?" asked Sheila, peering back toward the trailer again. She wasn’t afraid of dogs, but the stealthiness the animal had exhibited seemed unnatural. She tensed, and the overdose of caffeine made her feel even shakier than before, but nothing moved in the shadows.

She did notice that the neighbor’s dog wasn’t barking. That was unusual. Any movement outside normally brought a raucous response from the animal, and the sky seemed to have gone strangely dark and starless, the moon having dropped below the horizon in preparation for the dawn. Suddenly she recalled the darkness in the dream, and she shivered.

"We can talk about this inside," she said, nodding back toward her open door where a thin wedge of golden light illuminated the stoop like a searchlight’s beam.

The girl shook her head emphatically, backing away down the drive.           

"Look," said Sheila, holding up both hands in surrender. "I don’t care about the garbage. I’ll pick it up myself. Just tell me what you two are doing out here at this hour and where you’re going."

The girl glanced at her companion, but the woman had stopped walking, and the girl didn’t seem to be able to tug her any farther.

"I have coffee," said Sheila, trying to entice the woman inside.

But why did she want her there? Why not just call Charlie or let the mysterious pair go their own way? An inner voice kept telling her that that was the wisest decision. Whatever these two were running from it was probably better not to get mixed up in it, but one look in the girl’s eyes told Sheila she could not do that. In the child’s fear-filled expression she saw images of her own unreasoning terror. Whatever the kid was afraid of, Sheila could not abandon her, or the woman with her who didn’t appear to be all there.

"Coffee and donuts," said Sheila, watching the woman’s ears prick up.

The girl still peered around the back of the trailer uncertainly.

"I have to open the diner soon," said Sheila, still trying to find the right combination of words to lure the girl. "You like bacon and eggs? Cereal?"

When a broad grin appeared on the woman’s face the girl sighed and allowed Sheila to lead both her and the woman inside the trailer.

Chapter 20

Silky opened the basement door with more than his usual trepidation. The tray in his hand held a pot of coffee, a cup, a bowl of cereal, and two pieces of burnt toast with no butter. Always the same, every morning for the past forty years. Maybe the sameness represented stability, something to hold onto in a world where reality was very seldom real, but those few times he had attempted to break up the pattern-exchanging the toast for English muffins, for instance-the meal had been refused.

He flipped the light and hobbled onto the landing, staring down at the cellar floor he’d laboriously constructed of washed beach stones over the years. How many trips had he made from the rocky shore up to the old house carrying one rock at a time, one a day? Some of the tide-polished pavers held their own memories. The odd-shaped and black-as-night bit of shale in the corner that had broken from the cliff as he watched-like some kind of secret island offering. The oval piece of granite near the base of the stairs that had been hidden beneath a couple of seagulls feasting on a crab until he chased them away, both of them screeching in self-righteous anger.

As he stepped from the stairs onto the stones he felt the familiar sense of tingling discharge building within the rocks as though they were transformers, then through the soles of his workboots, and he tried to draw the old energy and strength from it, but over the past few months something had changed. It was almost as though the floor now drew energy out of him. He felt as if he stayed in the basement too long he’d just drain away like fat melting off a piece of bacon, until there was nothing left of him but burnt, crispened flesh.

He hurried across the cellar to a blanket that draped down over the rough hewn granite foundation wall. Resting the platter on the floor he gently raised the covering and tucked it behind an ornate, full-length wooden mirror with foggy-gray, non-reflective glass.

The scroll work around the frame was so intricate a man’s mind could easily get lost within it’s tortuous carvings. Tiny villagers walked behind push plows, meandered beneath bridges and around neatly carved, but weirdly formed forests and streams. There were strange beasts of all descriptions, dragons, were-creatures, and pixies hardly large enough to be made out by the naked eye. None of the people were much larger than a fingernail, and there were thousands of them. The frame looked as though the slightest tap might crack its labyrinthine facade, but Silky knew it was much tougher than it looked.