The Brotherhood of the Wheel (21 page)

Dennis squeezed his wife's hand. He started to say something, but Agnes silenced him with a single glance. “I see,” he finally said.

Ava sipped her tea, then said, “I want to go out and look for my friends. Is it safe to do that with those … things around?”

Agnes nodded. “The shadow people come out at night,” she said. “Light, any intense illumination, will drive them off. A sufficient amount or intensity, like my tracer bullets, will destroy them, as will direct daylight. You are safe enough in the day from them, dear.”

“But not the bloody Scodes,” Dennis said, dabbing his lips with a napkin. “It isn't right, but those bastards can walk in daylight just fine.”

“The tow-truck guys?” Ava said. “Yeah, they were pretty creepy.”

“Stay clear of them, Ava,” Dennis said. “They're his dogs as much as those bloody curs in the junkyard and the woods. Bloody Scodes, the other bad ones, like the Scodes who grovel to him, bloody worship him.”

“‘Him,'” Ava asked. “Who is ‘him'?”

“I think you've had your fill for the day,” Agnes said. “You go look about for your friends. A good start would be Buddy's Place, the roadhouse.”

“Could you … come with me?” Ava asked, looking down at her teacup. “If you … y'know, don't mind?”

“Oh dear, I couldn't,” Agnes said, petting Ava's hand. “You'll be fine, though. The Scodes will keep to themselves unless they have backup: the others like them, or the creatures—the shadow people, the hounds … and the children. They all fear the daylight to one degree or another. I wouldn't let you go out if I thought it was dangerous, dear.”

“This is crazy,” Ava said, feeling as if the inertia of reason and reality had been switched off for a moment, like the sensation of those rides at the fair where the ground is dropped away from you. She felt a dizzy sensation of raw fear, a realization that she was awake and this was real, all of it, real. Gerry was dead. Alana was dead. Shadows walked here, killed here, without their owners.

“Are you all right, dear?” Agnes said, rising to go to her. She put her bony but strong and warm hands on the girl's shoulders. “I know. It's a lot to try to process, to accept and adapt to. That's why we don't need it all at once. There, there, it will be all right.”

Ava swallowed hard. It felt as if she were swallowing her stomach back into her belly. She pushed her glasses aside and wiped away the dampness at her eyes that had begun to form as the fear ate at her. She smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I'm okay. Sorry. I just … I just lost it for a sec. I'm okay.”

Dennis looked at the young girl. His color was back to normal. He watched Agnes give her a gentle hug about the neck. He cleared his throat—such a simple thing, really, yet it got harder each year, it seemed. “Aggie, go with her. Show her about the town, proper.”

Ava felt Agnes tense at these words, and she suddenly understood Agnes's reluctance to go. It wasn't fear of anything out there; it was fear of leaving Dennis alone. The two women looked at each other for a moment, and that understanding passed between them, and something … deeper? Older? Ava didn't understand the connection, but it was there—steady, powerful, but slumbering. Whatever it was, it gave her comfort and a sliver of hope. Agnes had felt whatever passed between them, too, and smiled, a twinkle in her eyes.

“Oh, that's okay,” Ava said, standing. “I'll find my way. I'm sure Agnes has more stuff to do than drag me around this Podunk town.” She walked around the table and leaned forward to give Dennis a quick hug. “It's really nice to meet you. Thank you for taking me in.”

Dennis patted her on the back. “You're quite welcome, my dear,” he said. “Be sure you're back well before sundown—and stay away from those damned Scode brothers.”

“Yes, sir,” Ava said.

“Let me show you to the door,” Agnes said. She led Ava out to the hallway, and Ava had a vague memory of lying on this floor, panting, hysterical, and exhausted from running for her life. The sound of gunfire and of Agnes bolting the stout front door, a smoking pistol still in her steady hand.

“Thank you,” Agnes said to the girl quietly. “He constantly wants me to go out. He worries about me being cooped up in here with him, but I love this old house. I actually used to dream about it when I was a young girl. And I love him. I'll never leave him, never let him feel alone. He's the best man I've ever known in all my life. He deserves someone to watch over him and take care of him.”

“He's lucky to have you,” Ava said. “I'll be back before night. Don't worry, I don't want to get caught out there with those things. You said try the roadhouse?”

Agnes nodded. “Buddy's, yes. Here, take this, dear.” Agnes opened the drawer of an antique end table in the hallway. Inside was her odd gun from the other night and a small revolver with a stub of a barrel. Agnes took out the small revolver, opened the cylinder, and checked the load and snapped it shut. She handed it to Ava, who took it as if she were being offered a poisonous snake. “It's a .38—very simple and safe. Pull the trigger and it goes off. You have five shots—the last three are tracers.”

“What is that?” Ava asked, nodding toward Agnes's gun as she gingerly put the pistol into her messenger bag. “That gun looks like something from an old World War Two movie, or
Indiana Jones
.”

“It is,” Agnes said. “It's a German Broomhandle Mauser. I learned to shoot with a gun like this.”

“In MI6?” Ava asked. Agnes shook her head and laughed. It was a beautiful sound.

“Oh, no, I learned to shoot at my old charm school,” she said. “It was called the OSS. My headmaster was a Mr. Donovan, and he was very insistent that all his young ladies and gentlemen be proficient shots. It's a skill that has served me very well, and still does.”

Agnes unbolted the door. Outside, it was a genuine bright spring day. Spring proper was still a few days off, but the chill was off the land, at least for now. Tonight might be a different matter. A few butterflies were flitting about, seeming to chase one another in the high grass that surrounded the house.

“Be careful,” Agnes said. “You should be fine, just use good judgment. I'll have dinner waiting for you tonight, dear.”

Ava walked out onto the porch. “Agnes,” she said.

“Yes, dear?”

“If this place is so terrible, so dangerous,” Ava asked, “why are you and Dennis still here?”

The same forlorn look that Ava had seen as Agnes looked out the bedroom window returned. “That is a very good question,” Agnes said. “One we can discuss over dinner. Go explore. Be careful. I truly hope you find your friends.”

Ava set off across the field in front of the mansion. She noticed a cobblestoned driveway to her right that was overgrown and choked with high grass and weeds. The drive led to a roundabout in front of the house. She walked toward the drive and followed it down to the main road, the only road, which seemed to run like a black artery through Four Houses. She didn't see any postings for what the road's name or number was. She noticed that power lines and poles ran alongside the blacktop road, with lines running off to the various homes along the way, including Agnes and Dennis's home and a trailer that squatted in the high grass on the opposite side of the road.

A woman, her hair in curlers, was hanging up laundry to dry on a clothesline beside the trailer. She was wearing tattered blue jeans and a brown halter top. She looked to be in her forties. Two children, about eight or nine years old, were playing with broken toys near the cement base of an old water pump. The woman and her children all stopped when they saw Ava across the road. Ava waved to them and summoned up a smile. They looked at her as if she had an extra head. Ava stopped waving and proceeded to walk up the road in the direction in which she had seen the roadhouse the other night, when the tow truck brought them into Four Houses.

About a mile up, on her side of the road, Ava approached the blackened ruin of another fine mansion. She recalled the feelings, a strange sense of sadness and loss, that had washed over her when she drove past the old, burned house in the Scodes' truck. She still didn't understand it, but it echoed the strange connection she and Agnes felt earlier today—a kind of understanding without knowledge, without words or definitions. The remains of the house squatted on a low hill, surrounded by tall grass. The grounds of the mansion were beginning to be swallowed by a heavy grove of trees, the harbinger of an encroaching forest.

Ava's foot fell upon the overgrown flat stones of the driveway to the house. She paused, a strange sense of déjà vu settling over her. She began to walk up the drive to the ruins. She wasn't entirely sure why.

She could see the house as it had been before the fire devoured it, see the beautiful, intricate gardens behind it. The fountains, the sounds of music and laughter in the halls. All the ghosts danced in her memory, but they weren't her memories. She reached the front lawn and stopped as if a wall stood before her instead of thin air. There was something … something in that stand of trees, in that dark forest, something. A dark shape stood at the terminator of the canopy's shade and the daylight. “Hello,” she said. “Cole, is that you?”

She began to step closer to the forest to try to see. Was it Cole? One of the Scodes? Some other resident of the town? She could feel eyes that she couldn't see boring into her, like a drill. Panic rose in Ava, accelerating, tumbling panic, and she stopped her advance toward the woods. It wasn't Cole. She sensed that something didn't want her going any closer to the house, and for an instant she almost bolted toward the crumbling remains of the front doorway. While the arch gave no physical safety, Ava felt,
knew,
she would be safe in there.
That's why you burned it down, isn't it?
she thought, but it wasn't truly her thought … yet it was, too, like something remembered.

It took great effort to turn her back on the trees and begin walking back down the drive to the main road. She kept waiting for whatever was in the woods to spring out of the shadows and chase after her, but it didn't. Soon she was back by the main road and walking, not running, walking, toward the roadhouse, and any friendly, human contact. She looked back at the ruined mansion on the hill and the realization struck her, the reason the place had seemed like a safe haven. The old house—it felt like home.

The walk to Buddy's was about two miles, all told, Ava thought. The sun was still high in the painfully blue sky. A chilly wind had picked up, but it didn't ruin anything. It would be good kite-flying weather, Ava thought. There was a beat-up old red Toyota pickup parked in front of the roadhouse, the sides spattered with dried mud. A couple of bicycles leaned, unlocked, against one of the posts on the open porch. A huge Winnebago Chieftain motor home peeked out from behind the roadhouse. The neon signs were still on, and there was the sound of music inside. Ava pushed her glasses up on her nose and stepped inside.

Buddy's looked like every honky-tonk and roadhouse Ava had ever stepped into. Half the place was a bar, with tables dotting the sawdust-and-peanut-shell-covered floor. There was a TV mounted in the corner above the bar. It was turned off. The other half of the place was a restaurant and a performance venue, with long rows of picnic tables covered with red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloths and a small, dark stage at one end. There was a screen of chicken wire between the stage and the audience—presumably to protect the performers from the occasional free-flying beer bottle or shot glass. A table of men sat on the restaurant and stage side. They looked like lumberjacks—all heavy beards, flannel, and work boots. A man and a woman sat at one of the round tables on the bar side. They were sharing a pitcher of beer and a basket of hot wings. The couple wore leather riding jackets, and both had a wind-chafed look to them, as if they'd been on a long motorcycle ride. Ava didn't recall seeing any motorcycles out front, though. Everyone stopped talking and stared at her for a long, hard moment. Ava tried to ignore it, then stared back at the couple. That seemed to do the trick. They all went back to minding their own business. There was a jukebox by the door—an old seventies-looking affair still playing 45-rpm records with faded pictures of Pat Benatar, Kenny Rogers, and ELO album covers on its case. Ava remembered the old Pizza Den her dad used to take her to when she was very young. The restaurant had the same jukebox. A hissing, scratchy rendition of “I Want You to Want Me,” by Cheap Trick, was playing as Ava walked in and made her way to the bar.

The lady behind the bar had sandy brown hair, cut to about neck length, and wore glasses. She had on a T-shirt for something called RavenCon, and was smiling. It was an infectious smile, genuine and warm—as if you were the center of her universe in the time she was looking at you. It made Ava feel safe and important. Ava smiled back; she couldn't help but.

“Afternoon,” the woman said. “You're new to town, welcome! I'm Barb, Barb Kesner. What can I get for you?”

“Is it too early to start drinking?” Ava asked. “This place…” Barb nodded and reached for a glass under the bar. Ava heard the crunch of ice as Barb filled the glass.

“Not for a lot of folks around here,” Barb said. She held the glass of ice in front of a bar gun and filled it with cola. She set it down in front of Ava. “But you're a little too young to be drinking the hard stuff, kiddo. Sorry.”

Ava nodded and took the cold drink. “Thanks,” she said, a little sullenly. While she could have told this woman that she had two joints, her remaining two, in her wallet and had been drinking since she was twelve, lost her virginity at thirteen, and had watched two of her friends die brutal deaths only a few nights ago, there was no reason to do all that. It was kind of nice, kind of normal, to think that she could get carded even in a weird little place like this. It gave her a feeling of connection to the rest of the world. She sipped her drink and relaxed a little inside.