The Influence (17 page)

Except… 

Except at the other end of the flat space there were two mounds of mud, each about two feet high.  

That was weird, he thought. How could there be mud here? It hadn’t rained recently, and there were no ponds or streams nearby. 

The mound on the right shifted, a section of mud sliding off to reveal what appeared to be the decaying body of a bobcat beneath. The dead animal’s blackened mouth opened and closed, and Dylan saw that the movement matched the nonsensical words spoken by one of the voices. 

Mud fell from the mound on the left, exposing a dead bird encased in the center of the wet dirt, and the bird’s rotted head jiggled up and down in time to the second voice’s responding laughter. 

He’d been confused when he’d stepped out from between the rocks, but now he was confused and
scared
. Swiveling around, intending to retreat and run back the way he’d come, Dylan was confronted by a pack of small creatures hopping out from the passageway through which he’d arrived. They resembled tiny kangaroos more than anything else, tiny kangaroos with rat faces and lizard skin, and they screamed angrily at him in high-pitched voices far too loud for their size. 

Behind him, the animal corpses in melting mud laughed uproariously. 

Dylan started to cry. He still had the pebbles in his hand, and he threw them one-by-one at the small creatures hopping toward him, but he missed every time, and one of the little monsters jumped directly in front of him, screeching. Even through his tears, he could see the look of hatred on the tiny rat face, see the sharp thin fangs in the wide-open mouth. Sobbing in fear and frustration, he called out “Mom!” at the top of his lungs. 

It was an instinctive reaction, a plea for help that had no hope of being answered. His mom was not here, and she would not be able to hear him from this far away. No one in town could hear him, and he suddenly realized that he could die up here and it would be weeks before anyone found his body. 

Turning, he ran across the open area, between the laughing mounds of mud, and attempted to climb the boulders at the opposite end. The rocks were high with no footholds, and he scrambled in vain, trying to get up and out. There were no other paths save the one that had led him here, and his attempts to climb grew more frantic as he heard the approaching screams of those hopping creatures. 

“Mom!” he cried again. 

One of them leaped onto his back, claws digging into his skin and holding on. The pain was unbearable and overwhelming, unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It felt as though he was being cut with razors, and he flailed about, hitting at his back, trying to get it off, lurching from side to side, screaming so loudly that his throat burned.  

Someone somewhere was calling his name, but he couldn’t focus on that because more of those hopping monsters were jumping onto him, and he instinctively turned around, shoving his back against the boulder, trying to squish them, trying to kill them, trying to get them off, but they held on and dug in, slicing open his flesh, and he saw more of them coming, hopping happily across the open space toward him, fangs bared. 

One of them either bit or clawed open his right ankle, and he collapsed on the ground, that leg no longer able to support him. 

He knew he was going to die. He was still screaming from the pain, still crying from the fear, but inside himself, beneath it all, was a strange stillness that allowed him for his last few moments of life to see everything as though it was happening to someone else. He heard his name called again and knew this time that it came from the rotted bobcat encased in mud. 

Next to it, in the other mound of mud, the corpse of the bird laughed like a boy. 

And then there was nothing but pain. 

SIXTEEN 

Jill poured herself a cup of green tea, popped in an old Tori Amos CD, took out a pencil and opened up her sketchbook. 

She hadn’t felt much like painting since meeting Ross, although she did not think the two had anything to do with each other; the timing was completely coincidental as far as she was concerned. She’d continued to sketch, however, and she paused for a moment to glance over her recent work, frowning as she turned the pages. Now that she looked at them, the subjects of her drawings were all sort of…gruesome. 

There was a detailed rendering of an eviscerated lizard she had found on her doorstep; a depiction of a dead child inspired by a recent news story; a close-up of a bloody eyeball; several examples of grotesquely deformed genitalia, and a fantastical landscape populated by hairy monsters recalled from childhood nightmares.  

Unusual, to say the least, but Jill had never been one to censor or second guess herself, and, turning to a blank page, she started to sketch something new. An instinctive artist, she liked to draw whatever came to her, without thinking about it or planning it out, and this time she found herself penciling in a dark room filled with cobwebs and farming implements. She worked from the outside in, the opposite of her usual method, sketching the room, its walls and roof, leaving an empty white space at the center. Whatever was supposed to fill that hole was the focal point of the drawing, was the reason she had started the sketch, but now that she was here, she was afraid to continue on. She had no idea what she would draw if she kept going, but she was afraid to find out, and she quickly flipped the page, starting instead on a purposefully benign picture: the mountains visible through the window behind her house.  

The CD ended, and for several seconds the house was silent save for the scratching of her pencil on paper. Then, from the kitchen, came the familiar sound of paws padding across linoleum, accompanied by the equally familiar jangle of dogtag on collar. 

“Puka?” Jill said. She stopped drawing, put down her pad and pencil, and hurried out to the kitchen. 

Where the back door was open. 

And Puka, her golden retriever, was walking in a circle in the middle of the floor. 

She almost didn’t recognize him. Most of his fur had fallen out, and what remained were spiky tufts. One of his eyes had been burned out of his head, leaving only a blackened cauterized socket, and the other rolled around uncontrollably, while, beneath it, bone showed through an exposed nasal cavity.  

“Puka!” she cried, rushing to the dog and falling to her knees next to him. How had this happened? And when? She hadn’t seen her missing pet since he’d swooped in and taken the crow that had crashed into her window, but he’d looked fine then. Had some psycho been torturing him? Had he been involved in a series of unique and unfortunate accidents? 

She tried to hug him, but he backed away from her, growled, then sped out the door. 

How the dog could see with one eye gone and the other rolling around randomly in its socket she had no idea, but he did not bump into the cupboard or the wall, and he sped surefootedly through the brush away from the house as she frantically called his name. “Puka! Puka!”  

She almost called someone—Ross was the first person she thought about, interestingly—but the dog was already out of sight, and no one would be able to find him and bring him back. There were tears in her eyes as she realized that this might be the last time she ever saw Puka. In the shape he was in, the odds that he would be able to survive on his own in the wild were virtually nil. 

How did he get to be in the shape he was in? she wondered. What had happened to him? 

And how had he gotten into the house? That door had been closed and locked since yesterday afternoon. If she hadn’t opened it, who had? 

Jill suddenly wished she
had
called someone. What if the same sicko who’d tortured Puka had brought him back home and purposely placed him in the kitchen?  

Even if it were possible, she was sure the person wasn’t in the house. She’d walked past every room, and she would have seen him or heard him. Still, just in case, she took a cleaver from the knife rack and opened every closet and cupboard in the house, even those too small for someone to hide inside. As she’d known, the rooms were all empty, there was no one there, and she locked the doors, taking a moment to peek out each of the windows to make sure she saw no one unfamiliar anywhere near the house. Most of her neighbors were out, but Shan Cooper was home—she saw his battered El Camino in the carport—and she gave him a quick call to find out if he’d seen anything unusual. He hadn’t (he sounded as though he’d either just woken up or was drunk), but she warned him that there was a possible dognapper in the area and told him to keep his eyes open.  

Shan had several bulldogs that he let run wild, and he was outraged at the prospect. “I see anyone I don’t know, I’ll shoot the bastard’s balls off. That’ll show ’em.” 

“It’s probably not anything,” she said, trying to calm him down. 

“I’ll shoot ’em!” 

It might have been a mistake to call Shan—she wouldn’t be surprised to hear the echoing reports of his shotgun throughout the afternoon as he blasted away at shadows and imaginary sightings—but at least she felt a little less alone. Jill walked back to where she’d left her pad and pencil, planning to continue where she’d left off. But she couldn’t get back into a landscape mode, and when she flipped the page and looked again at her first drawing, she didn’t like the empty space in the center of the picture. 

Putting the sketchpad away, she decided to start work early today. She logged onto the telemarketing command center, signed in, called up the script and first list of numbers to dial, clipped on her headset and got down to business.  

But in her mind she kept seeing the nearly bald Puka, one eye gone, one eye wild, walking around in a circle in the center of the kitchen, and as she tried to convince people to protect their identities and buy credit card insurance she felt cold. 

**** 

Ross arrived at Jill’s house over twenty minutes late.  

She’d invited him for dinner, and he’d promised to be there by six, but things had come up. Shortly before five, he’d gotten an email from National Floor Mats. As Alex had predicted, he’d been offered a work-for-hire job, helping put together a needs assessment for the company’s proposed expansion, and while the consulting position was only for six months, the pay was decent and, as his friend had pointed out, it would boost his resume with more current credentials, He’d immediately emailed back his acceptance, then called Alex to thank him for his help.  

By the time he got off the phone, it was nearly six. On the way to her place, already running late, he’d encountered an improbable accident: a fenderbender involving a very masculine looking woman in a beat-up pickup truck, and that internet mogul’s model wife, who was driving a Cadillac SUV. The vehicles were blocking the narrow road, and the two women were standing toe-to-toe in the dirt, lit by headlights, arguing and one push away from a fight. It was all Ross could do to get them to calm down, exchange insurance information and finally agree to move on. 

“You’re a witness!” the model yelled at Ross as she got into her SUV. “I’m calling you for my court case!”  

The pickup driver shook her head. “Crazy stupid bitch.” 

Ross got back in his own car. 

To top it off, his cell phone was dead—again—so he couldn’t even call Jill and tell her that he would be late. 

As a result, dinner was ready and lukewarm by the time he got to her house. He expected Jill to be mad at him, and wouldn’t have blamed her if she was, but she didn’t seem to mind his tardiness and greeted him with a big kiss. She seemed a little on edge as she led him into the kitchen, and he found out why when they started eating and she told him about the reappearance of her dog. 

“Here in the kitchen?” Ross said incredulously. 

“And then he took off.” Jill took a bite of her stir-fried chicken, was silent for a moment. “I still don’t know how the door got open. It was closed. And locked. Puka certainly couldn’t open it.” 

“Did you call the police?
Are
there police around here to call?” 

“No and no.” 

Ross frowned. “What happens if there’s a crime? You have to be able to call someone.” 

“The county sheriff, I guess. They’re the ones looking for Dylan Ingram. You heard about that, didn’t you?” 

Ross nodded grimly. “His mom’s one of Lita’s friends.” 

“Do you think he’s…?” 

“I don’t know what happened to him. Hopefully, they’ll find him and he’ll be okay. I guess the searchers told his mom that last year they rescued a boy who’d gotten lost in the desert and was out there by himself for over a week. In the summer. So if he’s just lost, there’s a good chance he’s still okay.” 

“
If
he’s just lost.” 

The implication of that hung in the air. 

Jill sighed. “I’m not sure I like it here anymore. I’m not sure I feel safe.” 

“You can come back with me tonight.” 

“It’s not just tonight. And it’s not just this house. It’s…Magdalena.” 

His pulse was racing. Was this his cue? Should he invite her to come back with him to Phoenix, suggest that they move in together? Probably not. It was too early, too fast. But while he hadn’t planned to leave anytime soon, eventually he’d be returning to the real world, and if he could get her to come with him, that would be amazing. 

The moment passed.  

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just jittery after what happened.” 

“Understandable.” 

Jill smiled. “So how are things in your neck of the woods?” 

He would have told her the truth, would have described those monsters being hatched from chickens’ eggs, but she was in a fragile state and he didn’t want to alarm her any more than she already was. So he lied and told her everything was fine, then switched the subject to the meal they were eating, which was outrageously delicious. She told him how it was a recipe adapted from something she’d seen on
Iron Chef
, talked about her love of food, described her latest pastry concoction: a jigsaw-puzzle cookie that could be used up to four times without breaking.