The man left the wall and strode over to stand in front of me. He towered over Casey and my prone body, looking down with an odd sort of sardonic benevolence. There was humor in those eyes, but also something else. Something vast, and inhuman, and distant beyond all imagination.
“But that is obviously a culture wide movement, Mr. Garrett, and I shan’t hold it against you.” He knelt down, now smiling at me over Casey’s dark shoulder. “The important thing is—ordinary prose aside—it is clear you can carry a tale. That’s a marvelous talent to have, and it would be a shame to see it wasted. I confess storytellers have always interested me. I’ve met a few you have probably heard of, although I’m sure they are merely dust and bone by now.”
I struggled to make sense of this man, or to make an answer to his ramblings, yet my mind still refused to function beyond anything but the ability to bear witness to the phenomenon before me.
“Yes,” the man replied as if to some unspoken question on my part. “I’m getting to that. Cats of Saturn are nothing to be trifled with, and it stands to your credit you lasted long enough for me to arrive.”
The what of what?
“Never mind that,” he chuckled. “They are not truly cats, nor are they from Saturn as you know it. But back to the business at hand.”
He reached past Casey’s still form and laid his hand on the side of my head.
The pressure in my skull vanished. And while the scene remained gloomy and dark, it brightened noticeably as the sight in my left eye returned.
“I seldom do things like this, but this was not a situation of my making and I’m…‘flying by the seat of my pants’…so to speak. So I’m going to make this quick before moving on, and I need your undivided attention. Do I have that, Mr. Garrett?”
He could not possibly have anything but that.
“If you stay here,” he continued, “you will all die. In truth, you will all most likely die anyway…but here, that fate is guaranteed. Your only hope of survival is to get clear of this ‘event,’ and time is not your ally. Your original decision to head west was well considered. Stay with it. And if you make it as far as either of the overpasses spanning the train-yard, I will be there to aid you again. But only if you live long enough to make it there. Otherwise, you are on your own. Are we clear?”
I wanted to nod my head but couldn’t move.
“Excellent,” he replied as if I had succeeded in the attempt. “Then I shall leave you to it. Good luck, sir. I have other errands of mercy to run tonight.”
He said the last with a profoundly ironic amusement and straightened to his feet. With a tip of his hat, he turned and strolled over to the gate. Once there he wasted no time in working the latch and swinging it wide. But right as he started to step through it into the night, the man paused and looked back in my direction.
“Oh!” he exclaimed as if a new thought occurred to him. “One other matter, Mr. Garrett. Beware of large bodies of water.”
Large bodies of water? In Coventry Woods? Did he mean swimming pools? If so, we had a surplus of those in this neighborhood.
“Think of moths and spiders,” he added, “and when the time is right, it will come to you.”
Then he gave another brilliant smile and tip of his hat before stepping into the darkness beyond. Apparently he felt perfectly comfortable strolling out into the monster-filled night.
I simply lay there, staring at the gate and trying to make sense of the whole thing.
Had I been dying? Had I died? Or could this be some form of pre-death hallucination? What the hell just happened? What the hell was happening?
A second later I lost the luxury of pondering all that.
“Mark!” Casey screamed in my face. “Answer me! How many fingers am I holding up?!”
###
“Mark!” she screamed again.
“Nine!” I gasped, then winced in pain. “I can’t tell, Casey! You’ve got your hand almost against my face.”
Apparently that counted as answer enough.
“Oh, thank god,” she breathed. “Don’t move. You’re hurt. I need Ed to get over here and take a look at this... Ed! He’s conscious! He woke up!”
“Just a second, Dodger,” I heard his voice call back from another part of the patio. “I’m a little busy. Hold him still till I get there. And keep pressure on his wound.”
That’s when I realized she held some kind of cloth against my head with her other hand.
“Will do,” she answered, then turned back to me. “You heard him, stay still.”
Confusion roiled my brain and I tried to adjust to this latest turn of events. Had I been unconscious? I remembered Ed dropping the lantern, but now it sat with him on the other side of the patio. I couldn’t make out much else because there were several pairs of legs between me and it, casting shadows and making things even more confusing.
I did notice that the body of the lady who died in the monster’s jaws had been covered by the flag attached to my pole earlier. So apparently some time had passed, which meant I must have been unconscious. Didn’t it?
I didn’t feel like I had been out cold. I certainly couldn’t find any gaps between my being injured, the conversation with the strange man, and then Casey yelling at me about her fingers.
“What happened?” I groaned. “Who are these people? And who was the guy in the white suit?”
“Guy in a white suit?” she repeated in a suspicious voice. “What guy in a white suit?”
“Let me guess,” I carefully raised my hand to rub my head, “you didn’t see a guy who looked like an Egyptian pharaoh in a white top hat and tails go through here?”
“Riiiiight… Ed! As soon as you get a moment!
“Coming!”
I heard the rasp/click of his prosthetic approach, and in the next second Ed used the wall to help himself kneel beside me. He carried a bright yellow glowstick he held up near my face as Casey removed her hand from my head. Blood soaked the cloth she held.
“How are we doing, Mark?”
“I’m alright, other than a headache.”
“He told me he saw King Tut walk by in a top hat.”
“Oh sure,” I growled while trying to get my hands under me to push myself up, “it sounds crazy if you say it like that. I’m okay.”
“Mark,” she snapped, putting both hands on my shoulders. “Sit still! You just got hit in the head hard enough to knock you for a complete flip. In the real world, people die from those kinds of injuries. Now let Ed look at you.”
Seeing as she put it like that, I decided to be good and play along.
For the next couple of minutes Ed probed my head, while asking a whole assortment of questions. He asked about our location, the events leading up to my injury, the last book I wrote, and then a couple of addition and subtraction problems. I answered each back without problem, and actually got the math questions right…and I stink at math.
“Well, Dodger” he shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it, “I’m gonna have to say he’s okay. I know how it looked earlier, but I can’t find any injury other than the gash on his head, and it’s a flesh wound. It’s never good when somebody loses consciousness, but he’s lucid and seems to be in complete control of his faculties.”
“Not counting pharaohs in tuxedos,” she grumbled. Apparently she had decided to be difficult and not let it go yet.
“True,” he conceded. “But you don’t see this fellow now, do you Mark?”
“No,” I sighed. “He went away right before Casey managed to wake me up. I guess that sorta answers my own concerns on that matter too.”
Actually, it didn’t.
Even trying to convince myself it had been some sort of hallucination brought on by the blow to the head didn’t feel right. Down deep, I simply didn’t buy it. I could still see him in my mind’s eye with stark clarity, as if he had been the most real thing I had encountered this night despite appearing in a “dream.”
“Okay, let’s see if you can stand
,” Ed prompted. “Don’t rush it, just try and get to your feet. If you feel dizzy, go ahead and stay seated.”
“No problem.”
I climbed to my feet without difficulty, nor a hint of dizziness. My head hurt, but it felt like the burning pain of a cut, not the crushing pain of earlier. I further tested my equilibrium by lifting one foot and balancing on the other. Not a problem.
Ed shook his head again like he still didn’t believe it.
“Go on and wrap his head.” He shrugged and handed Casey the glow stick. “Looks like he’s good to go. He must have been in some kind of shock earlier. It happens sometimes…”
Casey gave him a doubtful look but didn’t argue.
“As for me,” he continued, “I’ll go back and wrap Mrs. Dower’s wrist.”
The girl snorted as she took a roll of gauze he handed her from the first aid kit. Apparently “Mrs. Dower” didn’t rate high on her triage scale.
“I know…I know…” he cautioned, “I don’t see anything wrong with it either, but you never can tell. Besides, I’m trying to keep people calm as possible and if catering to her a little bit helps, then so be it. Remember, that’s part of the job too.”
“Right,” she winced. “Sorry.”
“No problem. Since Mark is okay, I’ll send your friend over here in a minute since I get the feeling she’s finding Mrs. Dower a bit much as well.”
He clapped on the shoulder and then pushed himself back to his feet. The effort it took for him to do it only drove home the toll this night had taken on him. He was pushing himself hard and, despite the fact he put on a good show, the exhaustion showed on his face.
I watched him limp back to where a small knot of shadows clustered around the lantern.
I only got a brief look at them before Casey directed me to sit again and blocked my view, but the way the silhouettes hunched around the light unsettled me. I knew these were my fellow twenty-first century suburbanites, but the scene made me think of ancient men, fearfully huddled in a cave around their little fire.
“Okay, Casey,” I winced as she started to wrap my head, “since I seem to have been ‘elsewhere’ for a bit of time, what did I miss?”
“Well,” she frowned in concentration as she worked, “we’ve got two dead…three actually, but the other guy was already dead when we got here…two wounded, and one ‘asleep.’ That’s not counting the three of us. I’ll be honest, for a bit there I thought you were going to end up in the ‘dead’ category, too.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You were completely out, non-responsive, your breathing was shallow and irregular, and I guess due to bad lighting it looked like your pupils were anisocoric.”
“Huh?”
“Anisocoric…it looked like your pupils were different sizes. Which combined with the wallop you took to the head, had us scared it was severe brain damage. But a few minutes ago you started mumbling and breathing right again, so the thing must have only knocked you out. Don’t get too feisty though, being unconscious is never a good thing and you could still have a concussion. You were gone for a good ten or fifteen minutes.”
So I had been out, and longer than I thought. I didn’t like hearing that, especially since it came with the sick suspicion their original diagnosis hadn’t been an error caused by poor lighting at all. But I saw no point in rehashing it again. At the moment there were people around us I wanted to learn about.
As it turned out, my first opportunity arrived right then.
I had just started to ask Casey for a rundown of our new companions when the pixie appeared beside her.
That’s about the only way to describe the newcomer. While Casey’s five feet and four and a half inches would never cause anybody to confuse her with being tall (despite her dogged insistence of it being average-sized), she towered over this girl by a good four or five inches. And this young lady couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. Combine that with the bobbed blonde hair and the white footie pajamas, and she looked something like Tinkerbell at a slumber party. I guessed her to be in middle school and wondered how Casey knew her.
“Hey, Casey,” she greeted softly, “I heard your dad was okay, so I thought I would come hang out over here.” Then she paused at what must have been a shared expression on both of our faces before adding, “This is your dad, right?”
I held my breath, caught in a totally awkward position. I didn’t know this girl, and I certainly didn’t want to touch that particular question…at least not with somebody who moved in Casey’s circles before Casey and I got our stories together. Considering the tragic loss of her father, I had always been very circumspect to not do anything which might appear as an attempted intrusion on that territory. And since that meant the topic had never come up between us, this left me giving Casey a helpless glance of my own.
I half expected the type of disdainful snort the mysterious Mrs. Dower received earlier, but to my surprise it didn’t happen. Instead, she seemed to seriously consider the question while continuing to wrap my head.
“I guess so,” she finally answered with a shrug, “although he’s adopted.”
I couldn’t believe my ears.
Only the fact I already sat on the ground kept me from falling on my butt in astonishment. Sure, she had said it in an offhand sort of way, and added a somewhat snarky amendment, but the fact she even allowed the concept of “dad” and me together in the same sentence came as an absolute stunner. Hell, up until that moment I usually settled for taking comfort in the thought she didn’t seem to completely hate me.
So as crazy as it sounds, there I sat in a dark patio surrounded by death, blood, and a night world gone insane…while experiencing a surprise case of the warm fuzzies. For one brief, shining moment I felt like part of a total family, as opposed to a happy marriage with an unwilling hostage attached. And it felt pretty damn good.
Which naturally meant I had to open my mouth.
“So Casey,” I said in my newfound benevolent glow, “are you going to introduce me to your liiiiiiiiii…..”
I trailed off in dismay at where that sentence led.
Oh no.
“Little friend?” the girl finished with a faint half grin.
Aw crap.
I risked a peek up at Casey who now checked the tightness of my bandage with a look of exquisite long-suffering on her face.
“I did mention he’s adopted,” she deadpanned, “right?”
Fortunately, the girl seemed more amused than anything. I got the definite feeling in other, more normal circumstances she was of the perky/cheery persuasion.
“It’s cool.” She now smiled broadly. “So are you gonna introduce us or not?”
“Sure,” Casey sighed. “Ashlyn, this is Mark Garrett. He and my mom got married about eight months back. He writes detective novels about some guy named Michael Knox.”
“Mitchell Notch,” I corrected with a repressed groan. You would think after living with me for eight months she could at least get that right.
“Awesome!” Ashlyn chirped and extended her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
Then Casey glared pointedly at me and continued. “Mark, this is my classmate, Ashlyn Davis. She’s a senior and also happens to be co-captain of the North Houston Women’s Gymnastics team.
“Oh!” I exclaimed in sudden understanding as I took her hand. “You’re a gymnast! That explaaaaiiiiiinnnsss…”
Oh shit. Seriously?
“…why I’m so short?” Ashlyn finished brightly.
Sweet Jesus on a pogo stick!
Another glance at Casey revealed she now regarded me with an expression best described as horrified disbelief. I don’t think a single monster we encountered so far had managed to get that kind of reaction out of her.
“Ashlyn,” she closed her eyes and groaned, “I swear, he’s usually not this bad…at least when he doesn’t talk.”
Yeah, so much for the warm fuzzies. Only ten seconds into my newfound status as “adopted dad�
�� and I had managed to utterly embarrass her in front of one of her friends. That had to be some kind of record.
Mark Garrett…champeeeen bridge builder.
But once again, the pixie herself came to my rescue.
“Forget it,” she laughed. “He just met me, I’m five-foot-nothing, and I’m wearing footie pajamas. I probably look like the tooth fairy or something.”
I didn’t trust myself to reply without saying something else stupid, so I settled for giving her a pained, but hopefully grateful look.
“Anyway,” Casey continued while giving me a glare that suggested she was currently scanning my adoption papers for loopholes, “I didn’t get a chance to ask earlier…what are you doing here? I thought you lived where the school bus stops on Deer Ridge.”
“I do, but I was spending the night at Laura Kell’s house down the street.” All the cheeriness she had managed to muster vanished as she recollected. “I had gotten up to go to the bathroom when it felt like the whole world fell down. Did you guys feel it too?”
“Yeah.”
“So I went back to see if Laura felt it too, only she wouldn’t wake up. I knocked on her parent’s bedroom door but they wouldn’t answer either. None of the lights worked, and I guess I kind of freaked out. I started to scream for anybody to answer me, and then I heard something fall over in her brother’s room. I thought it was him so I ran across the hall and opened his door…”
I watched her face go pale as she relived it.
“It wasn’t him. I don’t know what it was. But it was big, and horrible, and it made this ungodly sound. I ran downstairs and out into the back yard. I intended to run to another house to get help, but then I heard some really weird animal noise nearby so I hid in the treehouse they have back there.” Then she lowered her voice and leaned in. “I stayed there until I saw Tommy hop over a fence in the yard next door. I didn’t know who it was, so I called out to him.”
Meaning she wouldn’t have called out if she had recognized this guy? Why not?
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