by Ray Garton
"No, Mallory." He stepped back, but not soon enough to prevent the growing hardness in his jeans. "Look, Mallory, why—why don't you get dressed, and—and we'll go to a movie or something, huh? Sound good? How about it?"
"A friend is coming to get me," she whispered, stepping toward him again, stepping close. Through his clothes, he could feel the warmth of her skin, and he wanted to touch her—
There's something wrong with me.
—he wanted desperately to touch her, but instead he jerked away, clenched his fists, and said angrily, "You're not going anywhere, Mallory." He left her room, locked the front door, the sliding glass door, and seated himself on a chair facing the hallway, waiting for her to come out.
She laughed in her bedroom and said, "Mace was right."
Jeff's hands were trembling, and he realized how heavily he was breathing, so he relaxed—tried to, anyway—leaned his head back, and took deep, slow breaths. He wouldn't let her go, even if he had to tie her down until their mother and J.R. got back. He drummed his fingers on the chair's armrests until Mallory stuck her head out of the bedroom doorway.
"Jeff, could you come help me with this?"
"Not packing, I'm not gonna help you pack because you're not—"
"But my friend is coming any minute." She went into the bathroom, dressed now.
Jeff didn't move.
The doorbell rang.
"That's him," Mallory called.
Jeff stood and slowly went to the door. The bell rang again. He looked through the peephole in the door.
A uniformed police officer stood at the door. He looked sleepy; his hair was mussed.
The bell rang again.
"Mallory?" the policeman called.
"Jesus," Jeff muttered, his insides suddenly sinking. He quietly put the chain lock on the door. "Jesus, Jesus Christ," he breathed, hurrying through the living room into the bathroom, but Mallory was gone, so he went into her room and closed the door, hissing, "Mallory, you're not going, goddammit, just stay here for the night, okay? Just for tonight, and we'll talk, you, me, and Mom, we'll—"
It was still dark in the room, and Jeff didn't understand why she was shuffling around with no lights, but that wasn't important, so he didn't reach for the switch, just hurried toward Mallory—
—he stepped on something soft that squirmed beneath his foot and made a familiar hiss-squeal sound.
Jeff cried out and nearly fell trying to move away from it, but there was another and another.
He saw the eyes shimmering in the darkness around him, on the floor and the bed, on the dresser, even in the open closet.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't move.
"See, Jeff?" Mallory said softly. "I promised Mace I'd come back. He's waiting for me." She lifted her suitcase and moved toward the door, watching him. The pairs of eyes moved aside and out of her way. "These… these are… well, he calls them his eyes, Jeff. That's how he knows so much, sees so much." Sadness crept into her voice. "Won't you come with me, Jeff? Mace doesn't push any rules onto us, he doesn't want us to change, he wants us the way we are. He takes care of us, pays… pays attention to us, listens."
"Ma… Mallory," Jeff whimpered, afraid to move an inch, "Mallory…" But he didn't know what to say.
The doorbell rang again.
"We can trust him," she went on, speaking faster. "Can you imagine that? Someone you can trust and respect? I know you trust Mom right now, but you shouldn't. There are things about her you don't know—I mean it, just like Dad—I loved him, trusted him, but he just left, just like that. Kevin's parents—you know what they did to him? They put him away, put him in some institution, some teen center. You can't trust them, Jeff, we're on our own. But we can trust Mace, really, so please, Jeff, come with me now!"
"Mallory," Jeff said, his mouth dry, "he's… I don't know what he's done to you, but you're wrong, you can't trust him"—he started toward her—"I saw what he did to Nikki, I watched him—"
The creatures closed in around him suddenly, squealing, and his entire body stiffened.
Mallory opened the bedroom door.
"He's taking us away, Jeff," she said. "Away to someplace better. He's… well, I don't understand him, he's not like us, maybe… maybe not even human. But he wants us to go with him. So I'm going." She stopped in the doorway and watched him a moment. "If you want to come, Jeff, you know where to find us." Mallory turned and went away.
Jeff remained still as they skittered out of the room behind her, long, tapering tails dragging behind them, claws catching noisily on the carpet.
Where did they come from? he wondered. They weren't here a few minutes ago, they couldn 't have—
—unless they were here all along.
He heard the front door open, heard voices, dashed out of the bedroom and down the hall, but by the time he reached the living room the door was closed and Mallory was gone.
Cursing under his breath and trembling all over, Jeff went back to Mallory's bedroom, turned on the light, and looked around until he found it.
A hole had been chewed into the back wall of Mallory's closet. It was just big enough for one of those things to crawl through. They'd come from inside the wall.
He slammed the closet door, propped a straight-backed chair beneath the doorknob, then closed the bedroom door when he left.
He paced through the apartment for a while, trying not to cry, feeling angry, empty, helpless, and defeated.
After several minutes of pacing and fretting, he turned on the television, turned the volume up high so he couldn't hear the sound of the rain outside, sat down, and waited for Erin and J.R….
Twenty-Two
October 17-19
It had been raining off and on since the first week in October, but the rainfall had been heavy and constant since October thirteenth. The signs of winter settled in before autumn was half over. But the signs were different… odd….
The sky remained a bone gray over the San Fernando Valley, crawling with fat, dark clouds, patches of which were the color of dirty smoke. Sometimes the wind blew so hard that street signs swayed back and forth and drivers had to keep a firm grip on their steering wheels to stay on the road. A section of Moorpark Avenue was closed in North Hollywood due to flooding, and a detour was set up.
A mudslide in the hills above Encino caused nearly one million dollars in damage to the home of a popular singer. The young black man who had broken records with his concerts and album sales had been reclusive for the last two years, and the story brought reporters out in flocks with microphones and cameras, each of them trying to be the first to have a word with the singer since his self-imposed exile from the public eye. The story made national news, bringing attention to the bizarre weather taking place in Southern California.
The death of Officer Bill Grady was all but forgotten. There were too many other stories making news.
At Washington Memorial High School in Van Nuys two students brutally attacked their biology teacher on October tenth. The story remained in the forefront because the teacher, three months pregnant, had miscarried after the attack, and the students, a boy and girl who had met with her after class to discuss their failing grades, had disappeared. Even their parents had no idea where they were.
A widower in Sylmar had been bludgeoned to death, and his fifteen-year-old daughter was the prime suspect; she'd disappeared, too. The police questioned many of her friends and acquaintances, but some of them were hard to find as well; some had not even been attending school.
High school teachers in the San Fernando Valley were noticing a difference in many of their students. Students who usually paid little attention to their classes were becoming more unattentive. The most striking difference, however, was in their best students, the ones who always came to class and usually got nothing less than As and Bs. The grades and attendance of a good many of them dropped considerably. Teachers' lounges in the Valley high schools were filled with talk of a peculiar lack of attentio
n among the students, a restlessness similar to that in the springtime when the students couldn't wait to get out of the classroom. It was little more than a topic of casual conversation, and none of them thought it too strange. They attributed it to the odd weather….
When J.R. went to the faculty lounge on Monday morning, however, the casual conversation struck him as something more. He hoped to catch Mr. Booth before the day began so they could discuss a student of J.R.'s who had refused to meet five appointments in a row. As he walked through the lounge to the coffee pot J.R. caught snatches of conversation:
"… don't know what's wrong with them, but they all seem to be somewhere else, if you know what I mean…."
"… more hostile than usual…"
"… thought the whole class was going to jump me last Thursday…"
Booth was late, so J.R. stood by the coffee pot, inconspicuously listening to the others, until Mr. MacDowal, the head of the music department, approached him and struck up a conversation. They talked about the strange weather, and MacDowal went on for a while about his plans to go to Europe for Christmas vacation. After a few moments of conversation, J.R. asked, "Mr. MacDowal, have you heard any of your students talk about a man named Mace?"
"Mace… oh, yes, as a matter of fact, I have," he said, scratching his cheek. He was a tall, thin man with a long face and steel-gray hair that came to a peak above his forehead. "I understand he's quite a musician. Has a band, from what I've heard. I've never met him myself, but the kids talk about him a lot."
"Pretty popular, huh?"
"Apparently. I understand his band is playing in some nightclub this week. Wednesday, I believe. Probably some bone-crunching rock band, but at least he's got the kids interested in something. That's more than I've been able to do lately."
J.R. chilled. If MacDowal had heard of Mace, J.R. figured a lot of students were aware of him. And if those students were speaking favorably of him…
After pouring himself another cup of coffee, J.R. went to his office, sighing wearily as he seated himself at his desk. He'd gotten very little sleep the night before and was tired.
His dinner with Erin Carr had gone well, but the circumstances of their meeting had cast a definite shadow over the evening. Although he was very uncomfortable with her dishonesty with Jeff and Mallory, she was a strong and admirable woman who had worked hard to rise above the difficulties of being a divorced and unskilled woman with two kids to support. Sitting across from her in the small Chinese restaurant where they'd eaten made J.R. realize how long it had been since he'd been out with a woman. It was easy to admit to himself that he found Erin Carr very attractive; but when she became upset again and began to fight back tears, he tried not to think about her proud and beautiful eyes and how good her hand felt in his.
Things got worse fast when they returned to the apartment and found Jeff alone and silently crying in front of the television. He explained what had happened while they were out, showed them the hole in Mallory's closet, told them everything she'd said. He spoke quietly, moved very slowly with his shoulders slumped; he looked defeated, beaten down, ashamed.
Erin was upset herself, frightened by Jeff's account of the creatures that had ushered Mallory out of the apartment.
"Mice," she'd breathed, putting a trembling hand on J.R.'s arm. "I've been hearing them in the walls, but I thought they were just mice. They sound like… Jesus, rats, we've got rats, do you know what kinds of diseases rats carry?"
Jeff started to protest, insisting that they weren't rats, but the phone rang. It was Lily saying she would be over soon. Erin had a couple drinks and calmed down, and later, as Jeff and Lily talked quietly at the table, J.R. assured her he would do all he could to get Mallory back home.
"Do you have any children?" She'd asked, her eyes heavy from the liquor.
"No, but I've… well, let's say I've got some idea of what you're going through."
Shaking her head, she'd muttered, half to herself, "I've blown it. Big. Soon as I saw things getting bad between us, I should have put a stop to it, should've sat down and had a long talk, straightened it out. But no, I was too… busy. Figured it would straighten itself out, I guess."
She was about to cry, and J.R. didn't want her to do that, didn't think he could bear her tears on top of everything else, so he gave her a big smile, squeezed her hand, and said, "You can do that as soon as she gets back."
On his desk, J.R. found a confidential memo informing him that one of his students, Kevin Donahue, was in the Laurel Teen Center for "extended counseling" and would be out of school indefinitely.
Just as Mallory had told Jeff the night before, Kevin's parents had "put him away."
J.R. looked through his schedule for the day. He had two appointments in the morning, some paperwork to take care of, an assembly to attend in the afternoon, and another appointment at the end of the day. He could get out of the assembly; that would give him enough time to go see Kevin. He called the Laurel Teen Center to arrange a visit….
Jeff rode to school with Lily that morning. She picked him up at seven-thirty, and when he got into her car, she leaned over and cautiously kissed his cheek.
When Lily arrived at the apartment the previous night, they'd seated themselves at the table, and Jeff had recounted for her the events of the evening. When he was finished, she'd taken his hand and whispered, "Jeff, remember the last weekend before school started? That Saturday night? What were you doing? Do you remember?"
He remembered but only nodded in reply.
"Something weird happened, didn't it?" she'd asked. "Something you couldn't, like, put your finger on, right? Right?"
Another nod.
"Me, too. I mean, I was with some friends in the Galaxy Arcade on Lankershim, and all of a sudden—I don't know exactly what time it was—there was like a—I don't know, a power drain, or something. The pinball machines tilted, and all the video screens kind of, you know, went wonky. I looked around at my friends, and everybody looked like they'd just gotten the worst news of their lives. And—this is gonna sound stupid, but all of us, we all looked up at the same time, and the fluorescent lights—y'know, those tubes? —they were all dimming just a little, and we all hurried outside—I don't know why—and just stood on the sidewalk like everybody else, I mean everybody else was just standing there like they'd just been hit in the head or something. And we looked up, but… there was nothing there. Nothing to see, anyway. But… well, I felt like I'd seen something. I don't know what, because there was nothing there, but I had this feeling…. Then it was gone, and we were all walking along like nothing happened. We went out for ice cream and never talked about it. I'm not even sure they'd remember it." She shook her head. "But ever since then—you're gonna think I'm so zoned, I swear, but ever since then, things haven't been quite… right. I haven't slept well since then, and my dad has been—this is really unlike him—he's been more worried about me than usual. He's, like, always asking me if everything's okay at school, stuff like that."
Lily sat there and looked at him for a long time, waiting for a reply, but Jeff said nothing. Not because he thought she was crazy, but because she was right. She was right, and he knew it, and it scared him.
"It isn't just you," she whispered. "I mean, your family, your sister—it's not just you, it's everybody. Nikki, Kevin … You know, I'd heard about this guy Mace before, I just had no idea who or what he was. I still don't, but I know enough to be scared of him. Last week I sat in the cafeteria and heard four different people talking about him like he was a goddamned circus clown and they were little kids or something. It's not just us, Jeff, it's just that he hasn't sucked us in yet. Not like he has everybody else."
"So what can we do?" he'd asked.
"Warn the others, the ones like us who haven't fallen for whatever Mace offers."
Nodding, he'd said, "Yeah, but that won't get my sister back."
As he lay awake in bed that night his insides felt cold and empty. His imagination took off with the
speed of a runaway train, taking him into a future without his sister, a future in which he would have to live beneath a weight of guilt for having let her walk away again.
He thought about what Lily had said and wondered how many others thought Mace was their friend, how many would go to Fantazm on Wednesday night to hear Mace and his band play….
Lily looked tired as she drove, and neither of them said much for a while. Traffic was backed up on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and it only took them a few moments to realize they would be late for school. As they waited for traffic to move Jeff said, "What are you doing Wednesday night?"
"Nothing. Why?"
"Mace is playing with his band at Fantazm."
"You think we should go?"
"I don't know. I'm supposed to go to a birthday party that night. Maybe we should wait and see."
"Wait and see what?"
"See who else is going. Let's do some asking around at school the next couple days, try to find out exactly how popular this guy is."
"Why? I mean, what good will it do?"
"I don't know, but it's a start."
The wipers swept monotonously over the windshield, and the traffic clotted like blood in a corpse….
The radio played loudly in the living room as Erin sipped her fourth cup of coffee. The traffic reporter was rambling on about a mudslide on Laurel Pass that had backed up traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard all the way to Burbank Boulevard; it was getting worse, and there was no sign of improvement for at least several hours. That meant surface street traffic would be chaotic for miles around Erin's apartment.
She had been sitting at the table for nearly two hours trying to make a list of possible jobs to look into. So far, she'd come up with waitress and housecleaning. Neither would pay as much as dancing in strip bars, and she would have to get a smaller, less expensive apartment in what would probably be an undesirable neighborhood. If she waited tables during the day and got a job cleaning in a hotel or hospital at night, she might be able to swing it, but then she would have no life. Her time would be spent working and sleeping, and she would have none left to spend with the kids.