Lost Souls - Страница 14

Pines and alpine firs flavored as well as scented the air. The evergreen fragrance was so overwhelming that Erika could taste it, a not unpleasant astringency on the tongue.

Such weak light could not sustain grass or weeds, let alone significant underbrush. Moss might grow on rock formations, and mushrooms in damp corners, but otherwise the floor of the forest and the track on which she entered it were paved only with dead pine needles and moldering cones.

The path followed by the GL550 remained obvious. On both sides of the track, closely grown trees and rock formations and deadfalls of slowly petrifying wood blocked alternative routes.

The stillness of the forest might have been quite natural, but it seemed uncanny to Erika. From time to time, she paused and turned slowly in a circle, listening for a birdcall, a scampering rodent, the buzz of a last insect here on the cusp of winter. Sometimes she heard nothing, and at other times only the crisp cracking of bark as it fissured to accommodate the growth of the underlying wood or the creak of heavy boughs weary from bearing their own weight, and more than once she felt watched.

At last the track ended at the brink of a defile into which daylight cascaded. This declivity was perhaps fifty feet deep, twenty feet wide at the top, less than half that width at the bottom.

The walls of the defile were sheer. No vehicle could have driven down them.

If the Mercedes had followed this narrow path-and there had been nowhere else it could have gone-where was it now?

From the brink, she searched the bottom of the defile once more, but with no satisfaction. The stunted trees and tumbled rocks below were insufficient to conceal the wreckage of an SUV.

Doubling back along the track, she searched more carefully than before, left and right. Again the forest offered no trail even half wide enough for a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

On the county blacktop once more, as she approached the crest of the hill, she was overcome by the expectation that Victor would be waiting for her at the Explorer. She hesitated… then continued to the top.

As she had left it, the vehicle was locked and unoccupied.

Overhead: no eagle soaring. The sky looked cold and barren.

The return to Rainbow Falls took longer than the drive out from it because Erika’s perplexity distracted her. For a while her mind was divided between the memory of the track in the woods and the highway ahead.

She kept checking the rearview mirror. Nothing followed her. Nothing that she could see.

chapter 19

Nummy thought he must be seeing a miracle, the young man turning into an angel right in front of their eyes, silvery and sparkling, a little cloud of fairy dust rising off his face, like a halo around his head. The fairy dust puffed right through his clothes, too, and fluffed out kind of like wings that you could see through. The dust seemed to eat up his clothes, they were just gone, but the young man wasn’t naked, you didn’t have to be embarrassed to look at him. He wasn’t naked because he was sparkling and silvery and fuzzy around the edges and not as much like a man as he was a few seconds earlier. For a moment he was a very beautiful man-but-not-man thing.

The beautiful part went away quick, and you couldn’t believe he was an angel anymore. The not-angel took hold of the woman in pajamas and tore off her head, and out of the not-angel’s open mouth came a stream of silvery twinkle stuff that poured into the woman’s open neck and down into her like she was hollow and he was filling her up with his silver spew. Nummy didn’t see what happened to her head, it just wasn’t there anymore, and he didn’t see how the not-angel and the woman became one instead of two, but they did. Out of the two-in-one came a twisting silvery thing like a corkscrew, it stabbed into the tall man in boxer shorts, and he swelled up like he was going to bust open. Then the corkscrew seemed to turn the opposite way it turned before, and the boxer-shorts man shrank as the stuff of him was pulled into the two-in-one, so it was now a three-in-one.

The three-in-one wasn’t silvery and sparkling like before but more gray and ugly, streaked with bright red. You could see parts of three people put together in ways people never were meant to be, but you couldn’t get a clear picture of it because it didn’t stay still, it was always moving, like clothes tumbling around in a dryer past the little round window, except there was no dryer or window or clothes, just people parts in a big mess of ugly gray stuff, and the bright red turning darker, darker, maroon, and the people parts all fast turning gray.

Nummy slammed up against the cell bars before he knew who did the slamming, and then Mr. Lyss’s wild-monkey face was in Nummy’s face, with the rotten-tomato breath-“Give it to me!”-and Mr. Lyss’s hand was in Nummy’s pocket, pulling out the yellow plastic tube he put there like a minute ago, screwing off the cap. Nummy remembered where the tube came from, he gagged, and Mr. Lyss kept two of the tiny steel sticks and tried to hand the other four to Nummy. “Don’t drop them, might need them.” But Nummy didn’t want what came out of Mr. Lyss’s butt. Gray teeth spit words in Nummy’s face: “I’m not gonna die. You want to die, you die, not me.” And somehow the four lock picks were clutched in Nummy’s fist, the funny-shaped tips sticking out like tiny thorns and flowers.

Stuff was still happening in the next cell, but Nummy didn’t want to see any more. He’d seen so much weird stuff so fast he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, what it meant, so fast he didn’t know what to feel about it while he was seeing it. He still didn’t understand what he’d seen, but now he knew terrible things were happening and he knew what to feel. He was afraid, he was so afraid he was sick to his stomach, and he was so sorry for the poor people it was happening to. He didn’t look next door, kept his eyes on Mr. Lyss pick-pick-picking at the lock, and he could hear the quiet people trying to be heard, but they still couldn’t scream, their screams were little animal sounds trapped in their throats, squeals and whimpers. And moaning like nothing Nummy ever heard before, he didn’t want to listen it was so horrible, not moaning in pain but fear, moaning that seemed to melt Nummy’s bones, so he almost couldn’t stay on his feet. And there were other sounds, wet sounds, oozing and gurgling that made Nummy’s sick stomach sicker.

He didn’t look, but it wasn’t easy trying not to hear, so he talked to Mr. Lyss just so he had something else to listen to, kept asking Mr. Lyss to hurry, hurry. Mr. Lyss didn’t call him a moron or a dumbass or stupid, and he didn’t say he would chew out Nummy’s eyes, he just muttered at the lock in the cell door as he picked at it, muttered and snarled so it seemed like he scared the door open.

Then they were into the hallway and moving, Mr. Lyss leading the way past the cell where people were being killed. Killed. Killed seemed to be the worst thing that could happen to people, but somehow someway Nummy knew they were being more than killed, way worse than killed, though he didn’t know what could be worse.

At the first of the cells, where no one was being killed yet, a woman reached through the bars, reached out to Nummy, trying to say something to him. But she had a shiny thing on the side of her head, and she couldn’t make words right. Words came out of her thick and wrong, kind of how words came out of Poor Fred LaPierre after his brain stroke. She was more scared than Nummy ever had seen anyone, so he asked her what she was saying, and she said it again, and because he had talked a lot to Poor Fred after the brain stroke, this time he knew she was saying, “Please save me.” Nummy had four lock picks in his fist, but he didn’t know how to use them, and he called after Mr. Lyss to save the woman, but Mr. Lyss looked back and said, “She’s dead already.” Mr. Lyss tried the stair door, it wasn’t locked, Mr. Lyss went through, but Nummy held the woman’s hand, wanting to save her.

Then one of the people being killed in the middle cell at last screamed, a scream like an icy wind blowing all the way into Nummy’s bones, a hard icy wind that lifted him and carried him to the stairs, up the stairs behind Mr. Lyss, leaving the woman behind, all of the people behind, the killed and the soon-to-be-killed.

chapter 20

Returning to Rainbow Falls, Erika almost forgot the cinnamon rolls, but fortunately she had to drive past the Jim James Bakery, the sight of which reminded her why she had come into town in the first place.

She would have been distressed if she had disappointed Jocko. He was her only friend, but he was also the closest thing she would ever have to a child, and he was a perpetual child who would never grow up or grow away from her.

In a world that would regard him as an outcast or as a sideshow freak, or even as a dangerous monster to be terminated with dispatch, he depended on her not only for his home and sustenance, but also for his happiness. In turn, she depended on his dependence. They were each other’s defense against loneliness, a mutant child and his two-hearted mother, unrelated except by the fact that they were products of Victor’s hubris, pledged to each other at first by necessity but now by mutual affection.

In the bakery, as she stood at the counter waiting for her order, she hoped that however their lives might intersect Victor’s again, they would survive him as they had miraculously survived him before.