by Mary Bowers
I looked back toward Purity and saw her close her eyes and leave them shut. Then she began a tuneless, high-pitched humming that made the fine hairs on my arms stand up. I found myself unable to look up and see what Bastet was doing, as if a weight were pressing down on my head. Instead, like Edson, I made myself stare hard at the picture on the laptop.
Hours seemed to go by. I realized that I hadn’t checked my watch when I arrived, so I didn’t know exactly how much time had gone by, and I was reluctant to ask the others. But between Florence’s innocent prattle, Purity’s singing-saw humming and the darkness of the back room, lit only by the laptop’s image, the passage of time seemed endless.
But the waiting did come to an end. We heard a sound. We looked at the monitor and saw movement to the top and left of the screen. And Purity stopped humming. The sound of her keening had been bad; the absence of it was worse.
I looked at Ed and he looked at me. He nodded, and I whispered a combination of words I hadn’t put together since I’d been a little girl in church. Soundlessly, unseen by us, Purity had lifted to her feet. Without communicating with us in any way, she walked steadily out the back door of the shop, leaving us to follow or not, as we chose.
I heard Bastet’s feet thump onto the floor beside me and saw Wicked staring at her with illuminated golden eyes. She walked out, and we followed, entering the alley in time to see the white of Purity’s dress moving silently along, about fifteen yards to our left.
There was a mechanical whine, and up ahead, I heard Purity begin to sing loudly. In the time it took to glance nervously at Ed, her ghostly figure disappeared.
We ran.
* * * * *
I don’t know where Bastet went, but Ed and I pelted down the alley and stopped at the corner, looking left and right, listening. At the edge of human hearing, I could detect a slight grinding noise from somewhere to the south.
“This way,” I said, sprinting off.
Ed, who had whipped out his cell phone and was running the video camera, came along more clumsily, trying not to trip over anything in the dark while keeping an eye on the phone’s screen.
When we heard Purity’s voice go shrill, then silent, we stopped in our tracks.
This time it was Ed who said, “This way,” and I followed, running down a street parallel to the alley behind Girlfriend’s. This street had a strip mall, with parking set back from the street in front of the storefronts. One block more and we’d be in the neighborhood where Florence lived. Florence! I whipped my head around, looking for her, but I didn’t see either her or Wicked. I hoped like hell they’d stayed in the shop and were safe. Also, I realized I didn’t know where Bastet was. I could feel her, but I couldn’t see her.
The strip mall was bright with security lights, and there was nobody in sight, so we continued around the building and looked into the alley behind it. There was a smudge of something light against the darkness of the pavement. I poked Ed’s arm to get his attention, then I ran.
Purity was down. She was splayed out on the pavement like a dropped doll, and when I got to her I went down on my knees so hard I found bruises on them the next day. I didn’t even notice at the time.
“Purity!” I said, taking her shoulders and gently shaking. She was face-down, and I gently tried to roll her over so I could see her face. “Are you hurt?”
She rolled onto her side and looked up at me. The moon was low on the eastern horizon now, making a feeble glow, but a street lamp about twenty feet away clearly showed her face. She gave me a dead smile, the most shattering thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was like looking into the mind of a maniac.
“Say, ‘Oh, God, she’s dead,’” she told me in a whisper.
Horrified, I stared at her. Every pore in my body was pulled up tight, my scalp felt like things were crawling over it, and I couldn’t breathe.
She repeated herself. Then she winked.
I guess it was the wink that did it. I sat back on my heels as I suddenly caught on. The little minx! I had no idea she was capable of this kind of dirty trick.
“Oh, God, she’s dead!” I called into the night. I’m not much of an actress, but I still had a rash of goosebumps, and my voice came out in a way that scared even me. Then, as Ed came up and nearly dropped the cell phone, I whispered to him, “Not really.”
“Huh?” He was completely immobilized.
“Call 911!” I said loudly. Then I whispered, “Don’t you dare.”
“What?” The dope. He still hadn’t caught on. “Do you want me to call for help or not?”
I growled at him. “Shut up. And don’t call anybody. Get down here. Now!”
He hunkered down, looking closely at Purity, and finally – finally – he figured it out.
“What did you say? She’s dead?” said a horrified voice from beyond the strip mall’s back doors.
Purity, Ed and I looked at one another and smiled like cats. Ed and I quietly gave one another high fives.
Sparky came running and nearly fell at Purity’s feet. His little robot thing came trailing crazily after him, and beyond that, Phineas was running while trying to operate the remote controls.
“Is she all right?” Phineas called.
Before any of us could say anything, Sparky, who had realized what was happening immediately, turned to his good buddy and said, “No! My God, she’s dead!”
“What?”
Phineas put a death grip on the remote control for the robot and forgot all about it, leaving the thing bumping repeatedly into the brick wall. After a moment of shock, he ran over to us.
“She can’t be!” he cried, lowering himself to the ground for a closer look. “She never got anywhere near us. We didn’t do anything to her. Oh, Purity!” Then, seeing her smiling face, he screamed.
* * * * *
When he realized that we were all laughing at him, he got hissy. He lost the Victorian drawl and started using a vocabulary that was most ungentlemanly. Then I realized that Sparky, who’d been at the bottom of all the mischief, was enjoying the payback just as much as we were. That just wasn’t right. As I was pondering that, I heard a grinding noise somewhere off to my right and turned to look.
“Oh, Sparky,” I said musically. “Is that your first-born son bashing his head in against a brick wall over there?”
“Huh?”
He finally looked around and saw that his bot was repeatedly running itself into the wall, making louder noises all the time and starting to smoke.
“Phineas, you moron,” Sparky yelled. He started scrabbling around trying to grab the remote control, which his friend had forgotten he was holding. The robot, under orders to go forward, back, forward, back, was mindlessly pounding itself into scrap metal.
Phineas looked down at his own hands and realized he was pushing opposing buttons. Without warning, he pitched the remote at Sparky and said, “Here, you take it – and who are you calling a moron? You’re the one who’s supposed to be the mechanical genius. I’m just the lab rat. It’s in my contract – I don’t do machines.”
They bounced the device around while the robot spun itself in herky-jerky circles for fifteen seconds, then it reversed and proceeded directly at us, picking up speed. As bots go, it was about mid-size, but the thing still had to weigh well over a hundred pounds, with all that metal. Purity was still lying on the ground directly in the path of the smoking mini-tank. Her eyes popped as she saw it coming, but instead of scrambling out of the way, she froze.
“Do something!” I shouted, backing away crabwise on all fours.
“I’m trying,” Sparky shouted, pushing buttons and flipping toggles for all he was worth. “She’s not responding,” he said finally. “Get out of the way!”
There was a loud ping! and the little beast let out an ear-splitting shriek and started making noises like a popcorn popper full of ball bearings. Like a dying insect, it staggered, shivered, rolled onto its back and wiggled articulated legs in the air, then made a thick belching noise and st
opped moving. In a few seconds I smelled something burning. Then it gently enveloped itself in black smoke.
Sparky fell on his knees beside it, first reaching, then pulling his hands back, then reaching toward it again. Finally he looked up at Ed and shouted, “Look what you did! What did you throw at it? You tore up its gears.”
“Ed!” I said. “You didn’t throw your cell phone at it?” It was the only thing I had seen him holding when we ran out of Girlfriend’s.
“Of course not. I still had my worry stone in my pocket. I threw that. Not much of a projectile, but I managed to hit the bull’s-eye. Got right up inside the engine housing and jammed up everything. I don’t think she can even be cannibalized now. No, she’s pretty much scrap metal. That is one dead bot.”
“Shut up!” Sparky shouted. Having found a spot on the smoking machine that was cool enough to touch, he was caressing it. “She was the best battle bot I ever put together. I could outfit her with The Fist of Doom, The Juggling Saws or The Sparky Spikes, whichever I chose, all custom-built by me. My ideas. She won three tournaments in her weight class, and now look at her! You destroyed her.”
“Serves you right,” Purity said prissily as she pushed herself up and dusted herself off. She turned and spoke to the moon, which had just crested the treetops. “Retribution,” she sang into the night.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me!” Sparky cried.
“Nobody’s laughing,” I pointed out. “That was more – what’s the word, Ed? – jubilation. Exaltation. Not laughter.”
“I heard somebody laughing,” he said furiously. Then he muttered something about Purity’s mental state, which I won’t repeat. I wasn’t sure if we had an unseen audience out there enjoying the melodrama, but I was thoroughly entertained. Then I looked around and said, “I thought there were three of you. I mean, not counting that,” I added, pointing at the smoking heap.
Sparky whipped his head around. “Damn that Ricky,” he said. “Where is he? He was supposed to reconnoiter with us at the back of that shop of yours. We needed him. If he’d been here, this wouldn’t have happened.”
He was wrong about that, but I didn’t bother to argue. I was intrigued about just where Ricky had gotten to, though. I had a shrewd idea that there might be another alien abduction going on in Tropical Breeze, once again involving Cindy Shortner. These aliens just keep coming back for more.
* * * * *
“That was a lucky guess,” I said to Ed as we walked back to Girlfriend’s. “I mean, Purity’s guess that Sparky would run the bot around here tonight. I wonder what made her think of it?”
“It wasn’t a guess,” Purity said in her usual detached way. She was walking ahead of us, and didn’t even bother to turn around. “And it wouldn’t have mattered where we went. I told you Sparky would come to you, wherever you were.”
That stopped me in my tracks. Purity continued on, but Ed came back and asked me what was the matter.
“She did. She said he would come to me, wherever I was,” I repeated. “Oh, how could I be so stupid?” Ed was staring at me, waiting, and finally I told him what had just hit me. “I gave Sparky my phone, so he could enable it to get the feed from the spycam at the Cadbury House cemetery. He must have put a tracking app on it! He could’ve done it right in front of my eyes and I wouldn’t have known what he was doing. If he wanted his last prank to be on me, all he had to do to find me was look on his phone and he’d see exactly where I was. With all those pages of apps that come planted on your phone when you buy it, none of which you ever use, he could have just buried it in there somewhere and I would’ve never noticed it. I never look through all those apps. He was even able to delete the e-mail notifying me of the app’s ‘purchase,’ which never hit my credit card, since the app was free.”
“Where’s your phone now?”
“I left it back at Girlfriend’s, in my purse.”
“I’ll check it. Really, Taylor, why would you trust a guy like Sparky with your cell phone?”
“I like that! You’re the one who introduced me to him in the first place.”
“And I made it very clear he was not to be trusted.”
“Oh, all right. But . . . .”
“But what?”
“How did she know? She did say Sparky would come to me, wherever I was. How did she know he could track me?”
“You see, that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you for years,” he said, coming back close to me and getting right up into my face. “There are things that can’t be explained by ordinary reasoning. She doesn’t know how she knows what she knows. She just knows.”
Then he turned and walked off, leaving me blinking.
Back at Girlfriend’s there was yet another melodrama going on, and we walked right into the thick of it.
It turned out that we had all done Ricky an injustice. He had gone to Girlfriend’s to meet up with Sparky and Phineas after all. He’d just gotten there late. I was still dead certain that the Shortner girl was out there somewhere waiting for him to show up, but he’d been blindsided at Girlfriend’s, and the shape his face was in, I was pretty sure he didn’t want Cindy to see it.
Wicked had stayed behind with Florence, and as I said, he’s a very good guard cat.
Chapter 16
“I don’t think you’re going to have any scars,” Florence said complacently as she dabbed at Ricky’s forehead with a tissue.
Purity was standing in a corner of the back room of Girlfriend’s like a vaporous effigy, smiling to herself. When Florence started to ask what had happened out there, Purity had held up her hand. Into the confused silence that followed, she had murmured, “The circle is closed. Balance is restored. Say nothing. We are complete.”
Try thinking of a sensible response to that.
Nobody tried to stop her when she picked up her things and glided silently into the night. And nobody wondered who she was talking to when we heard her say, “Ah! Hello. How lovely to see you,” once she was out of our sight in the alley. By that time, I was half-convinced there actually were Wee Folk out there, and it may have been more superstition than cynicism that kept me from peeking outside to see who Purity was talking to.
Ricky was busy fretting over his pretty face and how it was his stock-in-trade and was the real ratings-getter for Sparky and the Gang, not Sparky’s lame-brained inventions, and now that his alabaster skin was no longer perfection itself, he wasn’t sure he could go on. He was ruined, ruined! I’m paraphrasing, of course. He sniveled and whined and never took his eyes off himself in the mirror, but to his credit, he never threatened a lawsuit. Maybe that was because he was breaking and entering when Wicked went after him, and Florence hadn’t called the cops on him. Nobody present particularly wanted to explain the situation to the cops.
Just about the point where I was going to tell Ricky to man up, Phineas showed up looking for him.
“What the hell are you doing sitting around here?” Phineas snarled when he saw him. He never asked what had happened to his face. Instead, he said, “Get your ass over to the next street. We’ve got 212 lbs. of scrap metal to load into the van, and we’re going to have to do it manually.”
“What happened to Big Bot’m?” Ricky asked.
“She beat herself to death,” I told him. “She must’ve felt guilty because of all the trouble she’s been causing lately.”
Phineas glared at me. Ricky looked back and forth between us in bewilderment, then finally looked at Phineas and said, “She’s not mobile?”
“She’s as dead as a pile of rocks.”
“How did that happen?”
I was done with these guys. “She was doing wall-banging aerobics. You better go get her. Bring a coal shovel.”
They glared and left.
“Are you sure he’s not too hurt?” I asked Florence once the door was shut behind Sparky’s best buddies.
“None of the scratches are deep. Wicked was just teaching him a lesson. He understood that he wasn’t a real burg
lar, didn’t you, you smart little kitty?”
Wicked was preening himself, sure that he was indeed a smart little kitty, and in the best of times, Wicked has an insufferable ego, so I decided not to make too big a fuss over him. Instead, I looked around for Bastet. When I finally looked up, I saw her back on top of the packing boxes, as if she had never moved. She was staring at me intently, and for a moment I was trapped by her green eyes, feeling that thing happening again. Ed was packing up his spycam and laptop, and wasn’t paying any attention.
Still gazing at Bastet, I said, “Ed?”
“Huh?”
“Did you say you’d burn a DVD of Sparky’s old show for me if I wanted it? Well, now that I’ve met him and his friends, I think I’d like to see it.”
Something in my tone of voice made him stop what he was doing and look at me.
“You don’t like reality shows,” he said.
“But this one stars people I’ve met. I’m just curious, that’s all.”
He was looking at me suspiciously, but finally he said, “I’ve got a couple of episodes right here on my laptop. I’ll put them on a thumb drive for you.”
“Thanks.”
“And you can have it as soon as you tell me the real reason you want it.”
I looked over at Florence, but she was busy trying to get Wicked into his cat carrier, which he figured was no place for heroes. She wasn’t paying attention to us.
“Something just happened that started me thinking, that’s all.”
He got sarcastic. “Oh, did something just happen? Whatever could that have been?”
I told him.
He thought it over, then said, “Sit yourself down. I’ll pull it up on the laptop and we can watch it together right now.”
“I have to walk Florence home. I don’t want her out alone at this time of night.”