Echoes of Darkness (23 page)

The right side of her face was a ruin.

What skin remained had the blackened look of burnt meat. There was an amoeboid splash of lighter color where the fluid from her eye had landed when it burst, boiling in its socket. Teeth were clearly visible where her upper lip had burned away, shockingly white in this darkened field of burnt flesh. Even the bone poking through her cooked cheek had a scorched, blasted look to it.

The fireman was crying. So was I. I gently pulled back more of the blanket, trying to see the extent of the damage. A high, breathy keening came from her ruined throat, and I saw something stuck to the pulling fabric. Something black and shriveled, but also glistening with fresh blood.

Along with the blanket, I had peeled away her ruined ear.

My stomach leapt into my throat as I choked on a sob and turned my face away—nothing in the world could have prepared me for this—and came face-to-face with the Mutes again.

One of the males and the one female were all over each other like hormonal teenagers. They were kissing passionately, hands all over each other, groping, squeezing and unbuttoning. The whole time their eyes were wide open, focused on the shape huddled in the fireman’s blanket. The other male was closer to the girl than the other two, staring at her. Red eyes reflecting the firelight, his mouth was slack and open, tongue protruding slightly. He had one hand shoved down the front of his undone pants, unashamedly working himself as he took in the girl’s pain.

They were all turned on by her agony.

It was more than I could bear. My rage overcame my fear of the things, of letting them know I could see them. I started yelling. “Get the fuck out of here, you goddamned ghouls!”

I stepped forward and put myself between them and the small, tortured girl. Their licorice stink overpowered even the soot and smoke of the fire, and I fought not to gag.

They didn’t stop what they were doing, though they suddenly . . . well, they flickered just for an instant, like they were part of an old movie. When the flickering stopped, they were dimmed. That’s the only way I can describe it. Like a filter had been clicked into place that affected only them. Their colors were suddenly muted, shadowy; and they were harder to see.

Other than that, they had no reaction. The one with his hand in his pants leaned slightly to the side to look around me and his hand kept working, right up until I grabbed him.

I may have mentioned that I’m a pretty big guy, and I work out. I bunched my fists in the material of his light jacket and lifted him right off the ground.

I shouted “Get the fuck out of here!” again, and his eyes opened wide in surprise, probably shocked that I could see him, never mind touch him. From the corner of my eye I saw the couple spring away from each other as I prepared to throw the one I was holding to the ground. Before I could send the pale sadist flying through the air, he ripped his hand free of his pants and thrust it at me, his flattened palm stopping inches from my shirt.

My chest exploded in solid, unbelievable pain. Pain I knew and still haunted my dreams—the pain of a suddenly stopped heart. I fell to my knees and let go of the Mute. He dropped to his feet and looked over his shoulder at the couple, who were looking at me, wide-eyed. Those weird, blood-red eyes were hard to read, but their silent expressions were afraid. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears, the thud-thud drowning out everything else, so my heart hadn’t stopped, but the pain . . .

The other two nodded, and stepped toward me, each bringing up a palm. The male thrust his hand forward and suddenly my pain grew, multiplied, as a line of fire traced itself down the center of my chest.

My sternum.

The female reached toward me, and my left forearm exploded in pain, exactly like the time I broke it playing football in high school.

It was pain upon pain, all distinct and yet complementing each other; each individual, yet multiplying.

A high-pitched keening penetrated the thudding of my heart, much like the sound the girl had made as her ear peeled away. It was
me
, though, and I had been making that sound since the first Mute had extended his hand toward me. It had only been seconds, though it felt like forever, and I was running out of breath. The sound petered out, my lungs emptied entirely, and though I strained to draw a breath, nothing happened.

That’s when I blacked out.

I came to in the recovery ward again. They’d given me the full workup, but they hadn’t found any damage, and no one could say what had happened to me. Hours later Jerry shambled in, plopped into the visitor’s chair, dirty, exhausted, smelling of smoke and blood, and asked what the hell happened.

I had been pondering this very question since I woke up, and it was while I was sitting there thinking that I noticed something different about the ward.

There were Mutes wandering about, just like before, but before they had ignored me. Now, despite the fact that I was in no pain, every Mute on the floor was watching me. Looking at me as they passed my door, staring at me as I walked down the hall.

They knew I was aware of them, and they were very, very aware of me.

I was terrified. Still am.

I had no answer for Jerry. I couldn’t tell him about the Mutes. Not while they were watching. Would he even have believed me?

He said, “That’s terrific. What I heard is you pulled back the blanket, got one good look at that girl, and you lost your shit. Started yelling about having to get away from her, then just screamed and passed out. That sound familiar at all?”

I had to admit that it did.

He said, “I told you that if you weren’t up to the job to take more time,” and ordered me to go home and call him in a week.

I agreed, and when I was discharged a couple of days ago, I did as he said. I came home.

The problem is, they followed me.

I went to the store this morning, and when I got back everything in my apartment looked untouched, but the rooms reeked of licorice. Opening some windows to air the place out, I spotted one of them, hanging out across the street from my building. I thought it a little funny that he was sitting on the curb, dressed as a homeless guy.

Weird
, I thought.
Why does he need a disguise when no one can see him?

Then my stomach clenched.
No one but me.

He was there keeping an eye on me.

So I kept an eye on him, peeking through the curtains every now and then.

And then there were three of them.

Then seven.

They’ve been trickling in all day, gathering in the street below. By afternoon there were almost fifty. By evening there were too many for me to count milling about down there. Passersby don’t notice them. Motorists don’t see them.

But I do. And they know it.

I’ve been thinking about what happened at the fire. They feed on pain, drink it in, eat it like candy. But I guess they can spit it back out, too. Give back your pain. Force-feed it to you. Three of them dropped me the other day. There are close to a hundred of them outside right now.

So I’ve been thinking. How much pain can a person stand before they just . . . die?

That guy in the ER, his hand was a mess, but he was just sitting there. Tree Girl was impaled in a dozen places, but she was still screaming. That little girl . . . half her face burned away, her ear peeling off . . . and she was still alive. Still kicking.

There’s no damage with what they do. So how much pain do you think they can give me before my body just . . . gives out?

How much?

Shit, I just checked the window, and they’re gone. I don’t hear anything—hang on . . . shit! I can’t hear anything but their fucking smell is coming from outside the front door, the front hall, so strong it chokes me. God, I think they’re—

Tape ends.

ON CATS AND CRAZY LADIES

“Tell me again why we’re doing this?”

Billy crouched in the bushes, staring through the greenery toward the huge house: three stories of white walls, old-fashioned gingerbread trim, and wide windows, all capped by a vast, peaked roof and surrounded by a fair expanse of lawn. He didn’t like the look of the place. Big houses like that, way out here on the edge of town, usually sported high-tech alarm systems. Alarm systems meant cops. Cops meant jail.

Billy really didn’t want to go to fucking jail.

He turned to see Dagner staring at him around a shrub, eyes huge behind his thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

“What?” Dag whispered. “Now?”

“Humor me,” said Billy. “What, you got something better to do until the old bitch leaves? Tell it to me again.”

The little man sighed. “Fine.” He indicated the house and its detached garage. “Great big mansion, way out from town. No neighbors. Cop response time, not so great—for them, anyway. For us, it’s pretty good. Rich old lady living all alone, goes out every day to buy food and shit. She goes out, we go in and find the cash she has stashed in the house. We can’t find it, we wait until she gets home, then make her
give
it to us. We find a bunch of sweet lookin’ stuff we could hawk for cash, we wait ’til we get her wrapped up, then pull that”—he threw a thumb over his shoulder toward the van parked amidst the tallest of the bushes—“up to the door and load in everything we can. Then we drive off, leaving the old lady tied to a chair for the mailman to find or something.”

He brushed his gloved hands together, as if dusting off after a job well done. “Easy-fucking-peasy.”

Billy looked at the big old house again, eyeballing the wrought iron fence surrounding the property, sunlight actually glinting off the spikes along its top. “What about alarms? Mansions like that usually have electric eye beams and shit.”

“Can’t be.” Dag grinned. “She’s one of them crazy cat ladies. Got like fifteen, twenty cats walking around in there—I’m not sure, exactly. I peeked through the windows with some binocs, but they keep moving around and fucking up the count. But that many cats, shit, you can’t have electric eyes, motion sensors, nothin’ like that. Especially this broad. Looks like she gives ’em the run of the place. And if you look around—”

A single finger stabbed toward the house, at targets
there
,
there
, and
there
, but at this distance Billy couldn’t tell
what
the fuck he was pointing at.

“—you can see she don’t have no security cameras or nothin’.”

“How do we know she even
has
money?” said Billy, trying to poke holes in the plan
before
they were in handcuffs. “I’ve seen a couple of them crazy cat ladies back home. Bag ladies in flowered hats, talking to cats like they were people. Acting like the cats talked back.”

“The cats again. She goes out every day to buy food for two dozen cats, and she ain’t buying the cheap shit. I’m telling you, Billy, those cats in there eat better than me.”

Billy eyeballed the smaller man’s spindly frame and didn’t doubt it.

“How do we know she even has—”

“I watched her in the market three days running, and she always paid with cash,” Dagner said, anticipating the question. “Never a bank card or nothin’. She got gas in that big car of hers with cash, too. I asked around, from some people who would know, and they say Agatha Harper
has
a bank account, but she don’t never use it. Maybe like once a year, if that. So whatever she’s using to feed her and all those cats, it’s in there, right now, just waiting for us.”

“Yeah,” said Billy, fidgeting nervously. “If we can even get in there.”

“I told you, the cats have a—oh, shit! There she goes!”

Billy whipped toward the house again, and a scarecrow stood on the front porch. Tall and skinny, with flyaway gray hair and a shapeless brown bag of a dress, she slowly pulled the door closed, speaking in the sing-song tones some people used when talking to babies, though she was too far away for Billy to make out the words. Three small, dark shapes squirted out through the closing door and began twining about her bent-stick legs, like clinging smoke. Billy hated the way cats did that, but Agatha Harper didn’t seem to mind, just stepped carefully out of the tiny tangle of legs and tails and made her way, with a slightly skipping gait, to the detached garage, entering through a side door Billy couldn’t see. In a minute, the big bay door levered itself open. There was a cough, then a low, powerful rumble, and a shiny black car rolled out . . . and out . . . and out.

“Holy
Christ
,” whispered Billy. “What the hell
is
that thing? It’s longer than our fucking van!”

“1975 Rolls Royce Phantom,” said Dagner, and Billy could hear the smile in his voice despite the snooty accent he’d assumed. “At twenty feet long, you are correct, sir; it’s two and a half feet longer than our van.” He dropped the accent. “I looked it up. And there ain’t a spot of rust or rot on her. I checked while the old biddy was shopping.”

He gave Billy a gentle chuck to the shoulder.

“Whaddaya think? Still wondering if she got money?”

Billy just watched the shiny black ark of a car pause in the driveway to let electric motors crank the gate back. The Phantom rolled smoothly into motion once more, turning toward town and gaining speed like the shadow of an avalanche, the gate shuddering closed behind it.

“Holy
Christ
,” he whispered again, and then Dagner was tugging on his arm.

“Come on, man, we gotta get in there before old Aggie gets back.”

They sprinted over the thick grass to the black iron fence, eight feet high, the top foot and a half canted outward to make scaling more difficult. Billy squinted up at the points, seeing them up close for the first time.

“Jesus, you weren’t kidding about them being sharp.”

Dagner just grunted as he tossed up first one padded moving blanket, then another. It was time to do something physical, and Billy knew this was why Dag had asked him along. Dag thought of himself as the brains of the operation—he thought he was the brains of
every
operation—and that worried him: Billy was one of the people who understood Dagner’s nickname.

When Valentine DuBois had decided to run with the rough crowd, he was smart enough to know a little guy named Valentine wasn’t going to cut it. Having “Danger” tattooed across his left bicep to help bolster his contention that “Danger is my middle name” might not have been the smartest thing to do, but going to a shitfaced tattoo artist while shitfaced himself was even worse. He hadn’t even noticed the tattoo was misspelled until he was already showing it off, and by then it was too late: Valentine “Dagner” DuBois was forever stuck with the moniker, and a permanent reminder that Val DuBois was a fuck-up.

Billy looked at his partner and had to refrain from shaking his head. At five foot two, and a buck twenty if he was wearing a heavy coat and boots, Dagner DuBois almost could have walked right between the bars, but there was no way he was getting over them without help—not even if he had a ladder. But he’d draped the packing blankets over a section of the fence to help Billy avoid being skewered, and was, even now, leaning into the fence, bracing himself the way Billy had taught him.

“You ready?”

Dag nodded, and Billy went up and over him, stepping on a thin thigh and narrow shoulder on his way to the top of the fence, where, using the padding and one of the fence posts, he went up and over the spikes as well. He turned to find Dag wincing, rubbing the stepped-on shoulder.

“You ready?” he said again, then stuck his own knee and shoulder through the bars. He had to stick an arm through, too, and help boost the small man, telling him where to put his hands and feet, but eventually a hard-breathing Dagner DuBois stood inside the fence with him.

“Thank God we’re going out through the front gate,” Dag said, hands on knees. “I don’t think I could get back over that thing, even
with
your help.”

“Out’s easy,” Billy said. “You just have to—”

“No time,” said Dagner, tugging the blankets down. “The fence took longer than I thought, and we got to get into the house before she gets home.”

They made their way to the rear of the house, where an overgrown and weedy garden took the place of a backyard. When they reached the back door, Dagner pulled a ski mask over his face and threw himself down onto his back. He lay on the doormat for a moment, tried to look up at Billy, then started yanking on his mask, lining up the eyeholes with the glasses beneath. When he could finally see, he looked up at Billy, still breathing hard.

“If there’s any kind of alarm panel,” he said as Billy slipped his own mask into place, “or the door looks wired or something, I’ll holler to you and you hide—out by the front of the house, if you can. I’ll nab her when she comes in,
after
she punches in the alarm code. Got it?”

“Yeah, I guess s—” Billy started, but Dag had already pushed the pet flap open, and begun to work his way through. He lead with one hand, and had his head and shoulders inside the house before something occurred to Billy.

“Hey.” He crouched beside Dagner’s writhing body, stage-whispering through the opening. “This looks awfully big for a cat flap. Are you sure—”

“That’s . . . because . . . it’s a dog flap,” Dag said between grunts of effort, pulling his other arm through and twisting to get his hips lined up on the diagonal.

“She has a
dog
?” Billy was suddenly assailed by visions of skinny legs kicking spasmodically as Dag screamed, caught halfway through the door and unable to even flee as a rottweiler or a German shepherd ate his face. “Why didn’t you
tell
me she has a dog?”

It hit him like a slap that, what with a doggy door, there was no guarantee the dog was even
inside
the house. It
could
be—

He leapt to his feet, spinning in midair to land facing the yard, leather gloved hands ready to fend off a powerful, thrusting muzzle, feet
more
than ready to try their luck at racing a guard dog to the fence. Dagner said something, but muffled by the door, Billy couldn’t make it out.

“Whuzzat?”

There was no answer. He glanced downward—and found Dag’s legs gone, the pet flap swinging out, then in, then out, then still.

Oh, shit. Did the dog get him?

He hunkered next to the flap. “Dag?” he whispered. “Buddy? You all right?”

Nothing. Billy leaned closer. “Dagner?” He stretched forth a finger to poke open the flap, steeling himself to peek in, when, with a sharp click, the door swung suddenly into the house. Billy jerked back so hard he overbalanced from his squat, and his ass thudded onto the mat.

“No alarm panel,” said Dagner, looking down at him through the open door. “No wires I can see. It wasn’t even locked. Who knew?” With the ski mask covering his head, Billy couldn’t see the grin on his friend’s face, but he sure could hear it in his voice. “If you’re done sitting on your ass, you wanna come give me a hand?”

Billy scrambled to his feet. “What about the dog?”

“I just told you.” Dagner stepped back, inviting Billy in. “She don’t have no dog, but she’s got one great big cat around here somewheres. I seen him sittin’ on the windowsill a couple of times, catching some sun. Huge fucker. Now c’mon.”

They entered a kitchen like Billy had only seen in the movies: huge and spacious, with a big old stove and lots of counter space. Above a stand-alone central butcher-block workstation hung a huge rack, from which dangled, as far as Billy was concerned, every pot and pan known to man. “Jesus
Christ
,” he said pointing. “That fridge is bigger than my whole fucking
apartment
 . . . oh my God, what is that
smell
?” The pointing hand clamped across his lower face, pinching his nostrils shut through his mask, and he was glad for the layer of material filtering the air before it got anywhere near his nose. “Is there a body somewhere or something?”

“Cat box,” said Dagner. He hadn’t reacted to the odor filling the kitchen, but Billy could tell he was mouth breathing. “Or, cat
boxes
, I guess, unless she’s got the granddaddy of all litter boxes stowed away somewhere. I told you, she’s got like twenty cats in here, and one of ’em’s a doozy.” He looked sideways at Billy as they made their way across the kitchen, deeper into the house. “S’matter, didn’t you never have a cat?”

“No.” Billy adopted Dag’s mouth-breathing trick. “Don’t like ’em. They kind of creep me out, tell you the truth.”

“Really?” The grin was back in Dagner’s voice. “Then you’re gonna
love
this place.”

They hadn’t even crossed the kitchen before they found the cats—or, more accurately, the cats found them. Four of the little beasts came through the door at a trot, followed by a fifth, smaller cat, all apparently curious about the noise, or maybe expecting the old lady to be back from her food run; Billy didn’t know. The straggler hung back a bit, but the four never hesitated, approaching the strangers without fear, rubbing on and about the men’s shins. Billy tripped, stumbled, then came to a halt, the back of his neck crawling at the smooth, slithery feel of their little bodies against his legs.