Читать книгу The New Kid - Temple Mathews - Страница 8

Chapter Four: The Vanishing

Natalie entered her house and went up into her room. Even though the rest of the house was pretty much style-deprived, she’d done a sweet number on her own digs. The walls were dusty rose and she’d sponged her ceiling to look like clouds. A prodigious reader, she had scads of books and had them lined up in alphabetical order on a couple of wooden bookshelves she’d rescued from the alley, sanded down, and painted teal blue. She worked at her desk doing homework for twenty minutes but her brain was elsewhere. She got up and stretched, then fell onto her bed and thought of Will.

When she’d seen him at the bus stop that morning, she couldn’t believe how hot he was. She’d spent most of the wait for the bus stealing glances at him, noticing how trim and muscular he was, how well his jeans fit, how his blue eyes caught the light. She hadn’t been sure then if she’d seen right or had hallucinated but it seemed as though one of Will’s eyes was lighter, almost crystal blue, while the other was a deep, piercing sapphire. But she’d confirmed it in his basement, staring right into them as he fixed up her arm.

She looked at the bandage on her arm and even though Will had instructed her to keep it on for—what did he say, three days?—she was curious because she felt no more pain and peeled the bandage back. She felt like a caterpillar crawled up her spine when she saw that where the wound had been, her skin was smooth as silk. Not a trace of the injury remained. She shuddered and whatever yearning she felt for Will increased exponentially.

She didn’t like being so attracted to some new neighbor whom she hardly knew; it made her feel weak and vulnerable and the last thing she needed now was to feel more out of control than she already did. She tried not to think of him but she couldn’t because the thought of him was like something clinging to her skin. She decided to take a shower. One of the old movies her grandmother used to love to watch had a scene where some women sang, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,” and Natalie thought it was worth a try. She stayed in the shower a long time, washing and rinsing her long hair, and then turned off the water and toweled off. She got out and put on her pajama bottoms and a camisole and again fell onto her bed.

She closed her eyes and felt the stinging of tears, tears that came upon her suddenly. Why was this happening? She went to her night stand and picked up a picture of what looked like her with shorter hair. But it wasn’t her; it was her twin sister Emily. Same nose, same chin, same cheeks, same blonde hair only shorter, same sparkling eyes. Natalie held the framed photograph up to a mirror and positioned it next to her face. So alike they could hardly tell us apart, she thought. But we were different enough, and we knew it. Natalie watched as another tear emerged from her eye, not her tear but her sister’s; no one but a twin could ever understand. Why are you crying? she asked the photograph. What have they done to you? Where have they taken you? Please tell me, Em, please?

Natalie shut her eyes again, opening all her intuition, all her channels, making herself ready for a sign, a message, any kind of communication from Emily. She received them frequently. But there was nothing tonight. By her bedside sat a scrapbook. If she’d opened it like she had a thousand times before she would have seen the newspaper clippings about how Emily drowned while swimming in Green River, how even though her body had never been found, the police concluded that there was no foul play. Because of the drugs. Emily wasn’t a heavy user, she only experimented. She was just a chipper. Natalie had warned her dozens of times that nothing good could come from using drugs, but Emily always laughed in that little bird-like way of hers and blew her twin sister off. Natalie knew now, too late, that she should have been more proactive, she should have demanded Em stop using, even turning her in if she had to.

She remembered the night it happened like it was five minutes ago. They went on a double date with Jim Sparrow and Hal Stellini in Jim’s dad’s Range Rover. The guys and Em fired up joints and passed them around but Natalie refrained. She never saw the point of becoming impaired. She enjoyed her life au naturale, organic, without the use of chemical additives or addictives for that matter. She was already flying high. The music was fantastic, the warm night air like a blanket around them.

They drove with the windows down and then pulled in and parked by Old Mill Restaurant next to the river. The moon bathed the riverbank in a silver band of silk and they cranked up the stereo and danced. Natalie felt free as a nightbird. She loved watching her sister, who always danced like there was no tomorrow. Emily danced so hard and so fast that she was soon soaked in sweat and she kissed Jim and he whispered something into her ear. Shrieking, Emily ran into a thicket of trees, peeling off her clothes, and Jim followed. Natalie was blushing and feeling awkward because she knew Hal would be entreating her to do the same and there was just no way that was going to happen, even though Hal was cute and played guitar like Ben Harper. They just danced, and when the music slowed, they slowed down with it. Hal tried to kiss her but she didn’t feel that way about him. She felt bad because he was such a nice guy and she hated to hurt people’s feelings. So she let him kiss her on the cheek and he seemed for the moment satisfied.

When the sudden cloud cover blacked out the opal moon they hardly noticed. When the rain began to fall it was so warm that they laughed but when the trees shook and the river began to rise, Natalie became worried. She heard her sister shriek and her heart started hammering in her chest.

“Emily? Em?”

She ran into the thicket where Emily had disappeared. In her peripheral vision she saw the earth moving. Not the whole landscape, just patches of the damp, leaf-strewn earth—shapes, ugly, awful shapes that rose up too swift for the eye to see and then disappeared down again. Then in the distance through foliage she saw sets of eyes in the river, each with one green glowing eye and one yellow. The eyes blinked as the creatures in the river moved rapidly about, then disappeared. Natalie thought that surely she was hallucinating. Maybe she’d inhaled some of the weed and it was laced with something. Whatever it was, her head was spinning, and she heard things, too. Low, guttural sounds, the kinds of sounds animals make. She ran toward the river.

“EMILY?”

Natalie burst out of the thicket, onto the riverbank, and found Jim lying on his side moaning, his scalp bleeding.

“What happened?”

Jim just moaned again and felt his head.

“Where’s Emily? Jim, where’s my sister?” she demanded.

“Hey, take it easy on him, can’t you see he’s been hurt?”

Hal had arrived and was holding Natalie back as he leaned down to examine Jim, handing him his clothes, which Jim began to slowly pull back on.

“Jim, did you slip and fall?”

“No, they . . . hit me.”

“WHO hit you?” Natalie screamed.

“I . . . I don’t know . . . I didn’t really see them.”

Natalie’s eyes frantically scanned the riverbank, both sides, and the river itself. Her nostrils stung with an astringent smell, a strong chemical odor. It was so potent for a moment it burned her eyes. Then she saw the mismatched eyes in the river again; sets of eyes: yellow and green, those horrible, horrible eyes! She took one look at Emily’s clothes strewn on the rocks and then splashed into the river, screaming her sister’s name, her throat going hot and raw with the pain of dreadful possibility. What if, what if. . . . Her mind racing, heart banging in her chest, her eyes bled tears as she called for Emily again and again, then turned on Jim like a feral creature and bore into him with accusing eyes.

“Where is she, Jim? Where did she go?”

“She . . . she was right here, and then it got dark, and. . . .”

“What, Jim, WHAT?”

“And then I don’t remember.” Jim held his head and Natalie hated him in that moment for being so pathetic, so clueless. He should have protected her sister, not just let her disappear. Tearing her eyes from the river, Natalie looked back at the dark woods and ran upriver.

“Emily!”

She raced through thick brush and stinging nettles and blackberry bushes with stalks thick as her wrist. Thorns tore at her skin, and still she ran, crying out, her feet slipping in her wet shoes. But there was no sign, no sound, of Emily. Natalie staggered back down to the riverbank where the boys were huddled.

Hal tried to reassure her, “Don’t worry Natalie, she’s probably just downriver, they’ll find her. They will,” but voices whispered to her in the night wind, tiny evil voices like bones being crushed. No, they won’t. Natalie shook her head and the voices became the sound of the river. Had they spoken, or was it just in her head? The pain she felt was like a thick narcotic, slowing time as it coursed through her veins, her brain now sluggish, energy spent. Natalie looked up at the moon, the smiling face now a nasty grimace.

“Don’t leave me, Emily, don’t you dare leave me!” And then Natalie cut loose with a scream that rose from a place she didn’t even know existed, a scream that lifted birds from their nests and drove rodents farther underground—the howl of a twin torn asunder. And just as suddenly as the sky had darkened the clouds above parted and the river seemed to calm down. For a split second Natalie thought she saw eyes, yellow and green eyes, again in the river, near the bottom. Fury cleared the sluggishness from her body and she ran and dove in.

“Jesus, what are you doing?” yelled Hal. He hesitated, and then dove in after her. They were both underwater, their thrashing kicking up silt that swirled up from the river bottom and turned the water a murky green. Hal’s hands found Natalie’s wrists and, gasping, he pulled her from the river and onto the bank.

It was a night that Natalie prayed to forget and yet her heart would never allow it. It was the night when it seemed as if the river itself had risen up and claimed her soul mate, her sister, her other half. Without Emily, Natalie felt utterly incomplete.

In her bedroom Natalie put the picture of her twin sister back on top of her nightstand. The night of terror and loss was the past. The only thing that mattered now was getting her back. Everyone thought Natalie was crazy, thought she was just another wounded twin who lost her sibling and would be forever haunted, a loony who held out hope when there was none. But Natalie knew different; she knew her twin sister was alive.

On the streets of Harrisburg a chilly wind buffeted Will as he rode his turbo scooter, carrying the megaspatial awl in a small telescope case that stuck out of his backpack. He had a rule about weapons, which was never design anything that couldn’t be jammed into a backpack. This device, though technically not a weapon, was capable of exuding great force, so he had to be covert. Like all his weapons and gear it was of his own design and manufacture and Will knew he had to be careful hauling it around. The boys at the Pentagon would love to get their hands on any one of Will’s inventions, including this one.

Any curious onlooker would no doubt conclude that Will was riding his scooter up to high ground, up to the local lover’s lane, Netter’s Ridge—some called it Makeout Heaven—to set up his telescope and gaze at the constellations. What a good boy, studying the stars for his science class. In fact Will loved to stargaze, but he had no time for that tonight, not after seeing the blip on his geothermal radar screen.

When he reached an intersection, instead of heading up the hill he turned and took a long street that sloped down to the lowest part of town, the city blocks that held the Harrisburg Cemetery. As cemeteries go it wasn’t bad, no better or worse than others he’d spent far too much time in. This one had a rustic split-rail fence surrounding the perimeter, as though the land held sheep or cattle instead of decaying corpses. Using his infrareds Will scanned the grounds. No creatures larger than a small rabbit were in attendance, so he unpacked the megaspatial awl, loaded it with blast cartridges, and then powered four sensor spikes into the ground in a quadrant enclosing the cemetery. Then he zoomed down another street and every few hundred yards or so blasted another spike into the ground. It took him more than three hours but he eventually had Harrisburg plugged in, letting him monitor demonic movement as far as the city limits. When he was done he was thirsty enough for a Big Gulp and swung by a 7-Eleven.

Inside the small convenience store he pumped himself a root beer Slurpee, paid for it, and took it outside where he found a low wall to sit on, enjoy his drink, and feel the cool night breeze against his skin. Sometimes it felt so good to be alive that he ached. On occasion he would allow himself to enjoy these simple moments, quaint pleasures of a normal life, but invariably his thoughts would bring him back to reality. He wasn’t normal and he never would be. He looked up at the sky and closed his eyes. I miss you, Dad, he said in his inner voice. And he thought he heard his father say, I miss you, too, son.

Will was sitting in the shadows so he was pretty much obscured when the beat-to-crap ’91 Taurus pulled in, blaring “Sista Killer” from six speakers and two huge subwoofers in the trunk. A couple of gansta wannabees chugged down the last of some cheap tequila then pulled ski masks over their heads. Crap, thought Will, I’m so not in the mood for this. Can’t a guy take a break, enjoy his freakin’ Slurpee, and commune with the cosmos without the long slimy arm of crime reaching out to him? He guessed not. He watched the punks carefully, studying their eyes. They were bloodshot, pupils dilated from drugs, but not liquid black. Maybe these two were just a couple of drunk, doped-up losers. They sure looked that way on the surface. When he saw the 9mm come out and the clerk so scared he was going to wet his pants, Will sighed and knew what he had to do.

As the robbery was going down Will felt his anger bubbling up but he kept cool and calmly walked over and knelt down behind the swinging front door. He loaded up the megaspatial awl with a spike and blast cartridge and waited and watched the scene unfolding using a parabolic mirror. If the guy with the gun had put his finger on the trigger Will would have had to go on inside. But the money was being handed over without a fight so he aimed the megaspatial awl at the Taurus. Bye-bye. He fired a spike into the gas tank and KABLAM! The Taurus went up in a ball of flames, all four doors blown cleanly off their moorings. The punks turned and mouthed the obligatory F-words and then charged out the front door. That’s when Will stood up and clocked them both at once with dual upper-cuts that rattled their pea brains and dropped them in the doorway like two sacks of yesterday’s rotten apples. He felt a thrill course through his body, a feeling so seductive and pleasurable that it scared him. He shook his head, ashamed, willing the feeling to go away. It shouldn’t feel this good to hurt people, he thought.

Will picked up the gym bag they’d used to grab the loot and returned the cash to the open-mouthed clerk, who was still in shock but not so numb he couldn’t mutter a croaking, “Thank you.” And then, as Will started to cruise away into the night on his turbo scooter, the clerk came out from behind the counter, dialing the cops, and called after Will. “Hey, who ARE you anyway?”

Will just muttered to himself, “The New Kid.”

Fifteen minutes later Will was back in his basement refuge, powering up all his monitors. He studied the one linked to the geothermal sensors and the spectral scalar and vector magnetometers he’d just planted. The magnetometers had the capability to measure the component of the magnetic field in a particular direction, which meant that in combination with his ground-penetrating radar he could detect movement underground.

The cemetery looked dormant, no corpses rising, no catacombs active. The rest of the town was quiet, too. He moved to his main computer and hit some keys that began the recording process, then pushed his chair back and rubbed his eyes. Even Will Hunter needed sleep, and right now he needed it badly. He dimmed the lights, exited his lair, and climbed upstairs. Moments after he did, the monitor showed movement, a tiny red light flickering in one of the sectors. And then the light grew brighter. And began moving.

Upstairs, Gerald was multitasking, brushing his teeth and scratching his ass. He grunted as Will passed by him, then blurted out something nearly unintelligible. Will ignored him.

“May, I’m dalking do doo!”

Yeah, you’re talking doo-doo alright, thought Will. He sometimes wondered if Gerald wasn’t a human but a monster of some sort, but knew that was just his bitterness talking. The guy wasn’t anything so spectacular as a monster; he was just another middle-aged washout, and Will was duty-bound to make nice for his mother’s sake. So he smiled his good teenage boy smile.

“What’s up, Gerald?”

“How’d it go at school today? You didn’t cause any trouble, did you?”

“No more than usual.”

“That’s not funny. Be straight with me.”

Gerald grabbed Will by the arm, and Will stiffened. The red curtain formed in his brain and could have closed easily, in which case Gerald would have sustained grave bodily injury. Will was shaking, his anger coming to life swiftly and powerfully. But he knew better. He was tempted to give Gerald a good panda kick that would send him through the wall and probably crack his skull. Instead he thought of how much he loved his mother, remembered the smile on her face when he’d surprised her with daffodils on her birthday, and the scarlet curtain faded away. Will forced himself to stay in this quiet place while he relaxed his muscles and actually managed to produce another saccharin smile for Gerald.

“It was just another day, Gerald. I hope you enjoy your delicious cleansing beer while you watch Leno tonight. Goodnight.”

Gerald let go and muttered something foolish and vaguely threatening while Will quietly retreated to his room and collapsed onto his bed. Another violent storm averted. Will remembered how his father told him to choose his battles and make them few. Gerald wasn’t worth a battle.

There was but one vehicle parked on Netter’s Ridge, Duncan’s black-on-black Scion xB, and it vibrated with the sound of heavy metal death rappers enticing someone, anyone, to do something that they would perhaps enjoy now but no doubt regret later, doing twenty to life. Sitting next to Duncan was Mookie Heller, the handsome but thick-necked Thug One whom Duncan had earlier charged with guarding the boys’ room door. Their heads bobbing to the music, Duncan and Mookie smoked from a small metal pipe and sucked down rocket blasters, a combination of vodka and a popular purple energy drink, Zing. While he bobbed his head, Mookie flipped through one of the many tattoo artist magazines he had on his lap. The Mook was a tattoo freak, no doubt about it.

“I was hangin’ out at the Puke Parlor, watchin’ Black Dog lay down some ink. He let me practice with one of the needle guns. It was sooo cool!” boasted Mookie. But Duncan just fixed him with a hard cold stare.

“The hell you thinkin’ about that shit for when you can’t even do one simple thing I ask?” To punctuate his words Duncan smacked Mookie on the back of his head.

“Sorry I messed up today, Dunc, it won’t happen again.”

Duncan didn’t acknowledge Mookie’s answer, just kept bobbing his head to the music and clenched his jaws, bringing up thick veins on his temples. It wasn’t the music that Duncan was responding to; it was a voice that only he heard. It was a voice that told him what he must do. The voice was fathomless and raspy and gave Duncan the chills.

“Someone has come. I will need your help now more than ever.”

“Whatever, sure . . . you know I’m there, man,” stammered Duncan. Mookie looked over.

“You talking to me?”

“Shut up, Mook!” shouted Duncan. And then the voice spoke again, crawling into Duncan’s head through his ears like a snake.

“It’s time to prove your loyalty,” said the voice.

Duncan could hardly believe it. What more did he have to do? When the voice told him to single out a kid for a beating, Duncan listened and did as he was told. Yesterday the voice told him his mother was a whore and the paint salesman she was currently dating deserved to die. Duncan couldn’t agree more. But the voice hadn’t told him to kill anyone. Yet. Last week when the voice requested that he steal drugs from a local dealer, Duncan had no problem setting up the phony buy, meeting the skinny hippy freak in an alley, and then using a pipe to beat him bloody and steal his $500-an-ounce skunk. What could the voice be wanting him to do now, tonight?

“Higher, fly higher, Duncan,” said the voice.

And so Duncan smoked more, and drank more, smoked and drank until he could see the music rushing out of the speakers in neon hues, until his head floated up and parked itself above his body and watched while he patted Mookie on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

They got out of the xB and Duncan led Mookie to Lover’s Leap, past the “Danger” and “Caution: Steep Cliff” signs to the craggy bluff from which you could see the whole of Harrisburg stretching out like a vast black carpet speckled with twinkling lights.

“You know what I look like when someone doesn’t do what I ask?”

“Of course I do, Dunc, you look bad, that’s why I said I was sorry. You know I’m loyal to you, hell, I’d jump in front of a train for you.”

“Really?” asked Duncan, his bloodshot eyes struggling to find Mookie’s shape, let alone any expression of truth or dishonesty on his face.

“Yeah, man. We shouldn’t even be having this discussion. We’re tight, we’re solid,” said Mookie.

“Okay, then show me. Put one foot out there, over the edge.”

“Aw, man, Dunc, don’t make me do this.”

“You said you’d jump in front of a train. This should be nothing.”

Mookie’s balance was already severely impaired by the booze and drugs but two thoughts took hold in his soggy brain. One: He was loyal, dammit. And two: This would be over soon, he could do it. He lifted a leg up and reached it out over the ledge while he balanced on the other. He felt good, he had an incredible buzz on, Duncan was right, this was nothing. Mookie was so high he felt like he could fly. He was invincible. He turned and smiled at Duncan.

“There. See? You trust me now, Duncan? Huh?”

“Yeah,” said Duncan.

And then he pushed him. As Mookie screamed and fell, Duncan closed his eyes and felt a sudden gust of wind, warm as hot breath. His nostrils stung as he smelled the familiar acrid smell that assaulted him whenever he had these kinds of hallucinations. Because that’s what they were, weren’t they? They had to be. This whole thing couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t be. But it was. Duncan was infected, rotten to the core—a servant, a soldier, a slave.

Mookie didn’t die, but he broke both his legs and suffered compression ruptures in two disks in his lower back, an injury that confined him to a wheelchair for an indefinite period of time. Instead of funneling his anger, bitterness, and hatred toward Duncan, Mookie turned it all back on himself, channeling it inward. It was his fault, the voice told him, and the only path toward redemption was through servitude. He must serve him. And Mookie made up his mind that he would. He would shave the hair from his body. He’d always been into tattooing and now he threw himself into the art with a vengeance. His numb legs weren’t useless, they were a canvas and he would spend his days alone in his basement as the Michelangelo of tattoo artists, emblazoning himself with the perfect pagan symbols to prove his worthiness. He would be a soldier in the New Army, the Army of Rage, loyal only to the Dark One.