Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (10 page)

He was two doors away from the pub, passing in front of Skouras Travel Agency, when Artie shimmered into existence in front of him. It was nearly six o’clock and the shadows were lengthening enough that they lent the ghost a substance and texture that he usually lacked. In that moment, with the tarnished, diffused daylight hazing the air, Artie looked almost alive.

But he looked terrified as well. His black eyes, like pinprick holes in the universe, were wide and somehow still able to communicate emotion. Particularly now. Artie hung in the air, the laces of his high-top sneakers dangling, untied, and he rushed toward Jack as though he might attack him.

“Come on!” Artie said. “Right now!”

“What?” Jack asked, stumbling back a step. “What’s going on?”

Across the street, two fortyish women glanced at him, then picked up their pace to get away from him.

“The Ravenous is nearby. You should see it. You should know what you’re up against. Come on!”

With that, Artie turned and ran off. Though Jack knew that he wasn’t really running, that he went through the motions, it was easier to see that than only see his friend just floating along. For a moment, he hesitated, glancing at the front door of the pub. Then he swore under his breath and took off after Artie.

They ran west, up side streets, and Jack’s chest started to burn. He wanted to stop Artie, to ask him how much farther, but the ghost kept ahead of him, glancing back now and again to be sure that Jack had not collapsed. Finally, panting, he began to pass more and more people, and then he ran into Downtown Crossing, with its department stores and jewelry shops and cobblestones. The area was jammed with people making their daily exodus from work, jockeying for the entrances to the T . Others were shopping, swarming in and out the storefronts like ants.

A slim, sort of prissy-looking guy in a suit bumped Jack into an obese woman who scowled at him without even meeting his eye.

“ ’Scuse me,” Jack muttered.

No cars were allowed on the section of the street that was cobblestoned, so there were plenty of people on the road. Still, it was not quite as congested as the sidewalk so he stepped off the curb and dodged between people laden with packages and briefcases. They brushed by without a glance. Jack did all he could to weave among them, but Artie was well ahead of him now. He craned his neck to try to see the ghost, caught sight of his gossamer form for just a second, but then lost him again. Artie did not have to go around the people; he simply passed through them as though they were the ones who were not really there.

Jack wanted to shout for him to slow down, but even though no one would likely have noticed, he was too self-conscious to do so.

“Damn it,” he cursed under his breath.

Then he slipped past a woman in a power suit, and spotted Artie maybe thirty feet ahead. The ghost seemed almost frozen, his spectral form shimmering as though buffeted by some ethereal wind. The shadows of the buildings on either side of the street had created a valley of twilight gray where everyone seemed suddenly insubstantial.

Jack caught up to Artie, went around in front of him, and flinched when he saw the look of utter horror on his best friend’s face.

“Artie?” Jack said, voice a quiet rasp, trying not to draw too much attention.

“It’s here,” the ghost replied, without even glancing at him.

“It’s . . . you mean the Ravenous?”

“Look,” Artie instructed.

Jack spun around, but all he could see was the crowd, already thinning as the last of the major commuter rush filtered out of Downtown Crossing. There were still people going into Macy’s, and a kid tricked out in punk styles ten years older than he was walked out of the Barnes & Noble on the other side of the street.

“I don’t—” he began.

“No.
Look,”
Artie said again.

Jack felt stupid. He knew what Artie had brought him here for, but was still so unused to seeing the Ghostlands that it was not yet second nature to him. The truth was, he sort of hoped it never was. Maybe there was some switch inside him that he could turn on and off, where he could see the spirit world and then not see it. But it didn’t feel that simple. It was a lot more like lighting a candle than it was turning on a lamp.

Still, in that moment, he did it. He blinked, took a moment with his eyes closed to clear his mind, and when he opened them again, the world had changed. It was as though everything around him had been shot as negative film, the flesh-and-blood people seemed ghostly to him now, as did the buildings. As the people moved, there was almost a strobe effect, as though they trailed some of their life energy after them.

He looked at Artie. Solid. His shaggy blond mane of hair seemed to have life now, his sweatshirt with the rip at the neck had texture. But Artie still wasn’t looking at him. Fear rolled off the ghost like ripples of heat off the summer blacktop, and it was infectious. The long jog to Downtown Crossing had already gotten Jack’s heart pounding, but now something seemed to clutch at it, a tightness in his chest. It was at least eighty degrees despite the lengthening shadows, but he still felt cold.

Jack turned to see what Artie was staring at.

His mouth dropped open.

He whispered: “Oh, shit.”

“I can’t get any closer, Jack,” Artie said, voice so near, all the other noise around them slipping away. “If it sees me . . .”

The Ravenous.

The thing was huge, eight, maybe nine feet, but it was hard to tell because the thing was crouched over its victims, a homeless guy with silver hair and dark, leathery skin and a skinny goth girl with too-black hair who looked like a junkie runaway.

In the midst of the afterimages, the mirages of the living, the real people that swept around them, there were only these two ghosts. Probably this part of town was swarming with lost souls on a regular basis, wandering through the commutes and regular schedules they’d had when they were alive. But right now, it was just these two. The others had all been faster or smarter or just more awake. The others had gotten away.

They were nothing. Spirits. Wisps of intelligence and imagination, the essence of people long dead. But here in the Ghostlands, the realm of the spirits, they were more than tangible. The world of the living was all gray and washed out, but the ghosts were real and solid . . . and screaming.

It tore them apart.

As Jack watched, unable to tear his eyes away, this obscenity clutched at them with enormous paws, its claws gleaming silver. Its matted fur squirmed with life; things like maggots crawled through the thick black coat. It opened its massive jaws and ripped and tore chunk after chunk out of the dead souls. It was eating them, their essence, all that made them human.

“We have to stop it. Help them,” Jack said, his voice a rasp. “And you, man, you’ve gotta go! Get out of here!”

At last Artie looked away from the thing, and then it seemed as though he could not look back. He shied from it as though he could pretend it was not real.

“You can’t help them. We don’t know yet how to stop it.”

“We’ll figure out a way,” Jack said. “For now, just get the hell out of here.”

Artie gave a reluctant nod and rushed off in the other direction, not even pretending to walk now. He simply floated off until, maybe twenty yards away, he seemed to dissipate in a kind of mist. Jack thought for a second that meant that his connection to the Ghostlands was severed, but then he saw that the living people around him were still phantom images, the city like a shadow of itself.

But Artie was safe, at least for the moment. Right now that was all he could wish. When he turned to look up the street again, the thing was snuffling its black muzzle in the last bits of the old homeless man, in the ectoplasm or whatever it was that made up his ghost. The Ravenous snatched a piece of the old man up in its jaws, tossed it in the air, and scarfed it down in one gulp. Tiny shreds of the man’s soul fell onto its filthy fur, still moving, squirming, and Jack realized with deepening horror that the things in its coat were not maggots at all, but remnants of its victims. He had seen monsters before, up close, but the Ravenous made him hold his breath, made icy shudders run through him.

“God,” he whispered.

The Ravenous paused. Then it turned around and
looked
at him. Jack’s mouth opened but nothing came out. His chest hurt, his throat was dry, his bladder felt too full. He could hear the echo of his heartbeat in his head; too loud, too fast.

It saw him.

Jack Dwyer was alive, not a ghost, but when he was looking into the Ghostlands, the Ravenous could see him.

A growl like thunder shook the ground under his feet. The Ravenous whipped its scorpion tail back and forth, bared its fangs like gleaming scalpels, and started toward him.

Jack stumbled backward. He held his hands up. Then it hit him. He had to stop seeing. He closed his eyes tightly, pressed the palms of his hands against his face, and then opened his eyes again.

Still the Ghostlands, gray fog and the monster coming for him. It roared, loud enough to hurt his ears.

“No!” Jack shouted. “No! Make it stop! Stop seeing!”

Again he squeezed his eyes shut, slapped himself in the temples, and began to stagger away, then to run, eyes closed. He slammed into someone and went down hard on the cobblestones. Voices shouted obscenities at him.

He heard the snarl of the Ravenous, could practically smell its stink. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the soulmaggots in its fur, and the way it had torn apart the spirits of the dead.

“No!” Jack shouted again, and he opened his eyes.

Business suits. Briefcases. A couple of teenagers gawking at him, and an elderly couple with shopping bags scowling in his direction. The crowd on the streets had thinned, but the people that were still there cast him disgusted glances, this guy who had been shouting and slapping at his head and covering his eyes. He knew what they must think, and didn’t care.

He couldn’t see the Ghostlands anymore, could not see the Ravenous. But even as he rose, quivering, to his feet and began to walk out of Downtown Crossing, he was certain he could feel it there, its presence, stalking back and forth across the spirit world, just out of sight. It was searching for him now, Jack knew.

It had his scent.

Courtney had invited him to stay, but Bill had opted to go home. The last thing he wanted to do was overstay his welcome. He slept at her apartment a few nights a week as it was, but he did not live there, and he did not want to make any assumptions. Besides, the mornings after the nights he stayed over she usually slept later than usual, and it added stress to her life to have to rush through her usual ritual to prepare for the pub to open.

So he didn’t stay. But every time he had to go home, when he kissed her good night and let himself out the rear door at the back of the kitchen, he regretted it. Tonight was no exception.

When he had set the alarm on the kitchen door and locked it tight, he slid the pub keys into his pocket and walked down the alley that ran behind all the buildings on Nelson Street. It was used for deliveries and trash pickup, mostly, but it was also the easiest way to get to the small open lot where he, Courtney, and Jack all parked their cars.

The attendant was long gone for the night but he always left Bill’s car where it could be retrieved. It was an Oldsmobile Delta 88, a boat of an automobile he had acquired back when he was playing professional football and held onto ever since. The Olds had its share of dents and rust, but he kept it up pretty well. It was familiar, nicely broken in, and in some ways was just as much a home to him as his apartment.

Bill glanced up at the stars and began to whistle as he strode across the lot to his car. He reached for the door handle, and froze.

Twitching, he stepped back and sniffed the air. A low growl began to build in his chest and he glanced quickly around. He edged along the car, watching the shadows. When he reached the trunk, he saw that someone had popped it with a crowbar or something. His nostrils were filled with conflicting odors, but the stench from the car was clear above all the others.

Bill opened the trunk.

In it lay a human corpse that had been torn apart.

C H A P T E R 5

Bill slammed the trunk.

He started to change, could feel the bones shifting in him, the fur beginning to shoot like needles out from under his false skin, but he took a breath and composed himself. Bill raised his chin and sniffed at the air again, caught the scent right away.

A Prowler scent.

Not that he was surprised. The corpse in the trunk had been torn up by two of his kind; their scents were still on the dead man. But only one of them was on the car. Again, Bill inhaled that odor. It was male . . . and there was something familiar about it. He couldn’t place it, but whoever had left the little present in the trunk of his car was someone he had met before.

His head whipped to the left and another growl, softer this time, escaped his lips. Without a glance back, he sprinted down the alley, all of his senses attuned to his surroundings. The pavement was littered with decaying garbage and oil stains and he avoided them without even glancing down.

The body had been dead a day or more, in his trunk no more than half an hour. But the scent was fresher than that. Minutes.

Whatever had left it there had lingered to watch.

His muscles rippled under the masque of human flesh he wore and he yearned to let the beast out, but not yet. For in seconds he had reached the end of the alley, where it spilled out between two trendy boutiques right in the middle of Quincy Market.

There were no street performers now, no tourists, no balloons or flower vendors. Only the rustle of overfilled garbage cans in the summer breeze off the harbor, and the cooing of pigeons, and the forlorn forms of one or two homeless people who had found shelter on benches or in doorways.

And across the wide promenade that separated one long building from another, through the trees that had been planted in the midst of the concrete jungle there, Bill saw him. Just a silhouette, the shape of a man that was a false shape, his outline on the far side of a glass-enclosed restaurant, perhaps a hundred yards away.