Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (18 page)

“
Jack!”
the little girl piped up, prompting the others to all stare at her as though they had no idea she could speak at all.

“What are you all doing here?” he asked.

A murmur began to build among them, their voices like whispers, the flutter of a flock of sparrows taking wing from the branches of an oak tree. Though the real world continued on around him and Jack knew he must be drawing unwanted attention for what must seem to flesh and blood passersby like the behavior of a madman, he could not tear his attention away from these forlorn spirits.

“
It’s her,”
the spectral little girl said, craning her neck to gaze up at Jack. “
She called us here.”

He knew without being told exactly who the girl referred to. When he glanced up at the building beside him, the world reverted to normal around him with a pop like the flashbulb on an old-fashioned camera. Sound came rushing in, car engines and voices and the radio from a van passing by. An elderly man whose hair seemed woven from silver thread stared at Jack.

“You all right son?” the old man asked.

Jack shivered, his heart touched with the chill of the despair of the phantoms there on the sidewalk. The old man could not see them, of course. The way he looked at Jack was the way people must have looked at Columbus when he said the world was round. But Jack could still see them.

The ghosts watched him, each of their faces etched with a silent plea.

“She called. You heard her?” Jack asked.

The old man frowned, shook his head, and walked on, having used up whatever bit of Samaritan he had in him.

The ghost of the woman in the summer dress came to Jack now, reached up and tried to touch him. Her hand passed through, but Jack felt her essence on him, felt a warmth instead of the chill he expected, and he thought he smelled cinnamon.

Cinnamon girl,
he thought. And in his mind, that’s who she became, this beautiful dead woman.

“
She called to us,”
the cinnamon girl told him. “
And we heard. But when we tried to answer she couldn’t hear us. She pretended like she could, and she told my husband that I was happy now and he paid her.”
A flicker of rage passed over the specter’s features and then was gone. “
He paid her, you see? She’s a charlatan. But we keep hoping that she’ll hear us one day, if she’ll only listen.”
A
charlatan.
Jack flinched at the word, though it was what he had expected. Seeing the ghosts had given him hope that Madame Stefania might be the genuine article, but the truth did not surprise him. There was nothing the woman upstairs could do for him now. He knew he should just turn around and go home.

But he could not.

“Come with me,” Jack said, and he walked up the three steps to the door and pushed it open. On the street, several tourists gave him a wide berth, alarmed by his words and by his tone.

The stairwell smelled of mildew and cats. Jack climbed to the second floor with a parade of ghosts behind him. At the top of the stairs was a landing, and a white door with a sign on it identical to the one that hung from the front of the building. It was close and too hot and humid there in the stairwell, and Jack felt oddly claustrophobic.

Just before he reached the top, the door opened. The woman who emerged was perhaps fifty-five, her hair dyed bright red and wrapped in a gaudy scarf. She wore dozens of gold bracelets on either wrist and a brightly colored floral print dress that clashed with the scarf. When she spotted Jack where he had paused on the stairs, there was no alarm whatsoever in her face.

“I’m sorry. I don’t have any openings today. My next appointment is in half an hour and I’m just running out for coffee,” Madame Stefania said.

For he was certain now that was who it was.

Jack glanced at the cinnamon girl, whose ghostly form shimmered in the stairwell behind him. Through her he could see all the other ghosts, their gossamer figures lined up on down the stairs, and through them, the door out to the street.

“What’s your name?” he asked the cinnamon girl.

“
Letitia Soares,”
the dead woman replied.

When he looked back up at the fraud, the supposed medium had finally registered something more than curiosity. Her hand reached back toward the door to her office.

“Letitia Soares,” Jack said.

Madame Stefania only frowned.

Jack looked back at the cinnamon girl again. “She doesn’t remember you. When did you die?”

“
December twenty-first, in nineteen eighty-seven. My husband Esteban came to see her.”

Though he was horrified by how long the ghost had lingered here, waiting to be heard, Jack pushed those thoughts away and turned to the medium again.

“Esteban Soares came to see you in nineteen eighty-seven after Letitia died. You called to Letitia, lady, and then you pretended to talk to her and you took Esteban’s money. You stole his money and you lied to him.”

Madame Stefania stiffened. It was clear that she was used to being challenged and, now back on familiar territory, she returned to her familiar role.

“I don’t have any specific memory of the man you mean, but if he was one of my clients, then I did precisely as I promised. And I gave him the peace of mind he came here searching for,” she said indignantly. “Now if you’ll please move aside, I have to run an errand before my next appointment arrives.”

“Your next victim, you mean,” Jack said.

That pissed the woman with the jangling bracelets off. “Do you want me to call the police, kid? ’Cause I will.”

Jack sighed and shook his head. “Please do. Maybe we can have a talk with them. You called Letitia Soares, lady. What you never knew is that she came. You said you could help her speak to Esteban and she
believed
you. She’s been here ever since. She’s here right now, on the stairs with us, and there are others here, too. A lot of others. Men, women, little kids.” Madame Stefania stared at him, her penciled-in eyebrows arching suspiciously, her burgundy-smeared lips pinched together. “You’re out of your mind.”

“Why does that seem so impossible to you? Isn’t it what you claim to do? The difference is, I can really see them. I can talk to them. You’ve trapped them here, don’t you get that? Until you tell them you can’t really hear them, until they know there’s no hope, they’re going to stay here because they’re afraid to go on. You’ve given them something to hold on to, and that lie is keeping them from going on to whatever their final destination is meant to be.”

Madame Stefania looked as though she were about to shout at him, and Jack steeled himself for it. But even as the woman shook one hand at him, bracelets clanging, and started to speak, she faltered. With a deep frown, she looked at him again.

“Prove it,” the medium said.

Jack understood her, then. Though what she did was criminal, all of it a hoax, Madame Stefania wanted to believe it was possible. Something inside of her was crippled by the fakery of it, because she wanted to believe. He could see it in her eyes.

All at once, the ghosts began to whisper behind him, talking all at once, telling their own tales of loved ones cheated by the false medium. Jack shushed them loudly and Madame Stefania actually took a step back, doubt and fear on her face.

The little girl with the curly blond hair stood beside Letitia’s ghost, and Jack knelt and looked at her. He didn’t like being so close to them, not with the way their eyes seemed to fall away into some eternal darkness. But ghost or not, she was just a little girl.

“What’s your name?”

“
Amy.”

“Amy what?”

“
Amy Duvic. My mommy came to talk to the bracelet lady after me and Daddy crashed the car. Mommy didn’t have ’nuff money, but she had a nice bracelet and the lady said she could pay with that. I tried to tell Mommy no, don’t give the lady the bracelet, but she couldn’t hear me. ’N I tried to yell at the lady, but she didn’t hear either.”
It was all Jack could do not to weep. The ghost of the little girl lifted her chin high, proud of herself.

“Good girl,” Jack told her. “That’ll help.”

As he stood up again, he glanced at the cinnamon girl’s ghost, and Letitia smiled at him. Jack could see water stains on the wall right through her face, and though he smiled back, it was only halfhearted.

Madame Stefania glared at him imperiously. “Well?” she asked.

And so he told her Amy Duvic’s story. Even as the words left his mouth, he could see from the woman’s reaction that it was true.

“You could be some extortionist or something,” Madame Stefania snapped. “The Duvic woman could have told you all that herself.”

Jack felt tired. It was not even noon and this bitter, horrid-woman’s disbelief had exhausted him.

“Amy, can you show me which bracelet it was?” he asked.

The little girl smiled and ran right through him. Jack flinched and his stomach felt queasy again. While he watched her go up the stairs, her small feet trailing a sort of ectoplasmic mist, Madame Stefania stepped back to the door and glared down as though she could see the phantom girl.

“This isn’t funny,” the woman snapped.

But she did not go inside, and she did not want to call the police. As much as she did not want to be revealed as a fraud, Jack thought, she wanted too much to believe to run away now.

“
This one!”
Amy announced.

Jack started up the stairs. Madame Stefania looked as though she might order him to stop, to come no closer, but she said nothing. When he reached her, the woman reeked of incense and cigarette smoke, and he had to breathe through his mouth.

“Are you sure?” he asked the ghost.

Amy pointed at a bracelet that was not a chain but a solid piece made of two bands of gold in different shades, twisted together. The woman wore at least two others that were similar, but the little girl nodded firmly.

Jack reached out and tapped the bracelet. “That one.”

Madame Stefania flinched when he touched her. And then she began to cry. “Oh my God—” she began.

Whatever else she might have said then was blotted out by a sudden clamor on the stairs as the ghosts began to shriek in a deafening chorus. Jack spun frantically to see what the cause of it was. At the bottom of the stairs, the ghost of a man in an old brown fedora was torn apart, his essence lashed into tendrils of mist by some invisible force before the spirit disappeared entirely.

Even before he concentrated, focused his will on seeing into the Ghostlands, Jack knew. But then the world inverted again, and the ghosts were tangible and solid, and their screams seemed even louder in Jack’s ears. Letitia looked at him with those almond eyes, and he wanted to hold her, to save her. She was already dead, but that was not the worst that could happen to her.

For the Ravenous had arrived.

The moment Jack
shifted
his vision, the beast sniffed the air and it looked up at him, glaring, slavering. It was hideous, but beyond that, when he saw it he felt a terror that seemed to come up from his subconscious, as though it were some ancestral memory passed down through the millennia in the most primal part of his mind.

The Ravenous stood eight feet high, even hunched, its arms long enough to touch the ground, its silver claws like knitting needles. It had a thick, skunk-stinking black coat with those soul-remnants, soul-maggots, squirming in it. From its fur jutted rows of spiked bone horns that started on its forehead and ran up over its skull and down its back, where they joined just above a leathery red tail like a bullwhip. It wasn’t an animal, at least not a single animal, and yet it seemed like a sort of union of every beast that had been feared by primitive man.

Its eyes burned with hunger as it stared at him. It snuffled as though laughing and Jack tried to work out the coincidence of its being here at the same time he was.

The Ravenous slashed out at another ghost, its eyes on Jack, never leaving him, as though he were its real target. As though he were its prey.

Oh, God,
he thought.
I am.
He knew that it could not follow his scent unless he was seeing the Ghostlands, but he had done exactly that only a few minutes earlier, out on the street.
It must have scented me the second I did that. And it followed the scent here.

I’m the prey.

The Ravenous roared its hunger, and the ghosts kept screaming.

Jack’s every instinct told him to look away, to back up the stairs, to get the hell out of there. All he had to do to save himself from the Ravenous was to force himself, as he had done before, to
stop
peering into the Ghostlands. The monstrosity would not be able to see him then, would not be able to track his scent as long as he was not using the second sight he had somehow developed.

But how could he turn away? These people, the lost souls who clasped to the false hope offered by Madame Stefania, crowded the stairs between him and the Ravenous, and they would not flee. At the bottom of the steps, the hideous thing opened its jaws and they distended, stretched wide. With needle-claws it slashed out at the ghost of a bony, be spectacled man with only wisps of hair. The Ravenous, eyes burning bright, tore the skinny man open, then grabbed him up in its claws and began to rip at him with its jaws, consuming the dead. Its tail, ridged with bony spikes, jutted up behind it as though it had senses all its own.

Horrified, Jack could only stare. They had color and life to him when he peered into the Ghostlands, depth and weight, as though they were the living and he himself the spirit.

“Jack!” whispered the ghost of the cinnamon girl. “What do we do?”

A shudder went through him, his eyes locked on the Ravenous as it tore apart and ate another spirit. Twenty steps away, perhaps less. There were ten or twelve souls between him and the phantom beast. They backed up the stairs toward Jack, eyes wide with terror, clutching at one another and screaming, but they did not run. It made no sense. They could simply disappear, fade through the walls or stairs or ceiling, but the sight of the thing had paralyzed them all.

“Run!” he screamed at them. “Why don’t you run?”