Night Terror (14 page)

*  *  *

Marg was clicking a patient’s chart into the stand behind the counter as the automatic glass doors parted for Virgil. He stood in the cool night, smelling the sudden outrush of medicinal odors that could send an eight-year-old into catatonia, wondering how much more his poor nose could stand.

“Virgil! You old dog! Come on over and give Marg a hug.”

She managed, somehow, to slide her great bulk through the half door at the counter and out into the emergency waiting area. Virgil couldn’t believe it, but it looked as though she’d gained another twenty pounds since he’d seen her last. He couldn’t understand how the hospital could keep her on. She had to be hard on their group insurance. But she was a great nurse, a top-notch manager, and a wonderful people person. She wrapped him in a bear hug and he bussed her on the cheek.

“Missed you, you scoundrel!” she said, finally releasing him.

“Missed you too,” he said, dropping into a plastic chair.

“Hold on five shakes and I’ll get us some coffee.”

“That would be great.”

When she padded back down the hall toward him, she had two cups of very black coffee in her hands, and Virgil wondered what effect it would have when it hit the ground weeds-and-root concoction Babs had served him earlier. He sipped the bitter brew thankfully.

“You aren’t looking too good, cuz,” said Marg.

“Well, thanks for saying.”

“I mean it. You look like you need to get more sleep.”

“It’s hard.”

“I know. Have you thought anymore about hiring a nurse?”

“Doris won’t have one. She doesn’t want another woman running around in her house. You know how she is. Her home is her domain.”

“What about a male nurse?”

“Have you lost your mind?”

Marg laughed. “Right. That probably would be worse, wouldn’t it?”

“How have you been, Marg?”

“Same old, same old. My love life could be better. I don’t know, you think it’s my hair?” She cocked her head and patted the back of her tangled black hair with her hand.

“Could be. Considering a change?”

“Yeah. Been thinking of dying it green and getting spikes, checking out the butch scene down in Boston.”

“Good luck.”

“Nah. You know I’ll never leave this town. Got too many dead family buried here, just like you. Somehow I just can’t figure leaving them and living somewhere else.”

“I understand.”

“Where’s Doris going to be buried?”

Virgil gasped as though she’d hit him in the gut with a baseball bat.

“Sorry, cuz,” said Marg.

“It’s all right.”

“It is and it isn’t, I guess. Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brain. I was just curious.”

“We have a plot on High Street. The old church cemetery.”

“Your ma and dad are there, right?”

“And Doris’s mother.”

“Not her father?”

“They were divorced.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Doris never talks about it.”

Marg tapped his Styrofoam cup with her own. “You just cruising tonight?”

“Yeah. I stopped by to see Babs.”

“What on earth for?”

“I’m not sure now.” He told her about the sitting and about finding Timmy Merrill’s bike.

“Wow. That’s pretty weird, all right.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Me? I don’t know, Virg. I’m like you. I believe it when I see it, but then, you saw the bike. The question is, What do
you
make of it?”

“I can’t make a damned thing of it, but I keep coming back to the idea that somewhere, somehow, Babs heard or saw something, something that didn’t register with her at the time, but then it percolated inside her head and came out in Timmy Merrill’s voice in my bedroom.”

Marg nodded. “I think a lot of times that’s all the supernatural is. You don’t think Babs is pretending?”

“If she is, she’s a better actor than anyone I’ve ever seen. No, I think she’s telling the truth. She really believes it when these trances come over her.”

“What did Doris think of the sitting?”

“Luckily I don’t think she was too affected by it. I don’t want her head filling up with mumbo jumbo that keeps her awake nights. She’s awake enough as it is.”

“If it gets to the point where you can’t handle it anymore, give me a call. I know a couple of ladies that are real good, and if I explained the situation to them, they’d be as inconspicuous as kitchen mice.”

“Thanks, Marg. But I’m okay.”

“No problem. Everybody needs somebody sometime.”

“I was gonna write a song about that at one time.”

Marg’s smile was as wide as her hips. “Me too! What a coincidence!”

“The other day you were talking about Audrey Bock.”

Part of the smile faded. “She hasn’t been back, but I gather that’s because she’s seeing a shrink now.”

“I know. I went to see her.”

“Busy little beaver.”

“The doctor has her on Halcion.”

“That’s a standard drug for depression.”

“Could it cause hallucinations?”

“It’s probably supposed to keep her from having hallucinations.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Is she still having them?”

“She said she’s getting better. But I’m not too sure. Could you find out who her shrink is?”

“I don’t know. I guess I could if it was important enough. Is it?”

“Maybe it is. I don’t know.”

“He won’t tell you anything, even if I do find out who he is.”

“You mean he’s not
supposed
to tell me anything. Sometimes doctors can be helpful by the things they
won’t
tell you.”

Marg laughed again. “Okay. I’ll ferret out the info. You can slide me a fin the next time you’re in, gumshoe.”

Virgil stared at her, seeing not the fat jowls or the double chin, but the same sweet face he’d been trusting with secrets since grade school. “Where are you going to be buried?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I haven’t thought about it. Beside my parents, I suppose.”

“You have thought about it or you wouldn’t have asked
me.”

“Maybe a little.”

“I always kind of thought that you and I might be close. There’s room on our plot.”

“Are you serious? What would Doris say?”

“I mentioned it to her years ago. She said, ‘Honeypie, I just always figured you and that cousin of yours would be together for eternity. As long as you’re right there between us, it’ll be all right.’ ”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“So?”

Marg’s eyes were damp, and she sniffled as she spoke. “I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be. Sometime in the far future, I mean.”

“Put it in your will, then, and don’t forget. These things have a way of getting forgotten and then some klutz ends up getting power of attorney and they cremate you and drop your ashes over the Speedway.”

“That wouldn’t be so terrible. I know a lot of the guys in the pit crews.”

“Let’s don’t go there.”

They bantered like that for a few minutes until Marg’s eyes dried up and the lump in Virgil’s throat softened. Marg made a perfect three-point shot with her cup into the waste-basket beside the soda machine.

“I ought to be going,” said Virgil, rising.

“What’s your hurry?”

He glanced at his watch. “Need to make dinner for Doris.”

“I forgot. I just figured Doris would be home cooking dinner. Isn’t that stupid?”

“I do that too,” he said, and without warning, in spite of his best intentions, he broke down.

Marg pulled him into her arms, rocking him back and forth like a baby. She stroked his back and murmured in his ear as he sobbed against her. Marg was the only person in the entire world that Virgil could open up to, other than Doris, and this was the first time he had let out all the pressure that had been building since the doctor’s first diagnosis.

“Cry till you drop, big fella,” Marg whispered in his ear. “You got this one coming.”

A volcano of grief erupted outward, compressing his throat, spasming his stomach, and sending great rivers of tears pouring down his cheeks. The more he fought it, the weaker he became, until he had to give himself up to it wholeheartedly and let it go in a final all-encompassing wail that he buried in Marg’s soft shoulder. Through it all, her hands never left him, and when he pulled back she nodded and smiled gently, reaching up to wipe his face with a tissue from her pocket.

“Glad you got that out?”

“I’m sorry, Marg.”

“For what?”

“I didn’t mean to crack up like that.”

“That wasn’t cracking up. Cracking up is what you do if you don’t get the grief out. You can’t walk around all the time with all that in the back of your head. It’ll drive you crazy.”

He made a shot with the tissue toward the can.

“Rim shot,” said Marg. “But I’ll give you two points.”

“Distance was the same.”

“Don’t argue with the ref.”

“Get me that info, would you?” he said, rising.

“Think it’s important?”

“Now more than before,” said Virgil as the automatic doors
whooshed
open again.

26

THE CROW HOPPED ACROSS
Cooder’s gravel back lawn, clearing its throat. Cooder sat in his busted rocker that had only one arm, and stared straight into the black eyes of the animal. The bird had started out the morning in the top of the tallest spruce, cawing loudly when Cooder stepped onto the back porch. That had been six hours ago.

In all the time since, Cooder had barely blinked.

The bird danced slowly, ever closer, bobbing nervously, then settling down. And each time it settled, it found Cooder’s eyes still fixed on it. It was a game Cooder loved to play.

Of all the animals alive that Cooder knew, crows were the hardest. They were smarter than anything and wild as all get out. And ornery. Crows and ravens were hardheaded to beat the band. It was a lot easier to do when you could look them in the eye. But it was more than just the eyes. You had to sit yourself just right. The animal had to
know
that this big man-thing meant it no harm. Cooder’s hands were in his lap. His head leaned toward one shoulder. His legs were crossed at the ankles. But it was a lot more than just eyes and sitting right. Lord, yes. The bird had to
hear
him.

Inside its head.

For six hours he’d been silently coaxing the skittish crow forward, like a child clucking his tongue at a kitten.

Here, birdie. Here, birdie, birdie, birdie.

He could feel the bird’s fear. He could see himself through its eyes. He liked that. It was a trick he had learned years before. In Perkins. When he’d sat for days on end gazing out through the tall barred windows into the sky. Sparrows would land on the old granite sills and beg for crumbs.

At first he’d amused himself by taming the tiny creatures to his hand. The nurses and staff were bored and underpaid. They enjoyed the show. They could care less if he was feeding wild animals. Or eating them raw for that matter.

But as time went on, he began to have weird flashes. Moments when he thought that he
was
the bird. Times when he seemed to be seeing everything through the bird’s eyes. The first time it happened he had to stop when he fell down on the floor of his room. Hard to keep your balance two places at once!

It never really scared him though. Cooder was used to the flashbacks and blackouts and dead space in his head. He wasn’t afraid of the things that his brain did. He tried to
enjoy
them the way he enjoyed everything else. So when he started seeing the grounds outside of Perkins from the air again, he just leaned back in his bunk, closed his eyes, and enjoyed the ride. He got so good at it that he began to be able to coax the sparrows to the window without the bread crumbs. And then, finally, he didn’t even have to get the birds to come near. He could sit back, close his eyes, and slip right into their heads.

It was a strange trip, being inside the mind of an animal, but then Cooder’s mind didn’t work exactly the way other people’s did anyway, and Cooder’s whole life had been a strange trip. Cooder saw mostly pictures behind his eyes. He could work out the meaning of a sentence most times. If it wasn’t too complicated. But then he had to figure out where the words fit in with the pictures in his head. Sometimes, before he could do that, he forgot the sentence. But he managed all right. He saw where he wanted to go and he went there. He saw what he wanted to eat and he ate it.

Of course, he never told a soul about his jaunts outside the grounds of the institute. He’d made the mistake of talking too much before and had been real sorry that he had.

He couldn’t quite recall what his punishment had been, but he could still sense the horror of it.

The crow hopped up the back steps and now it bounced curiously along the edge of the porch, its head bobbing like a boxer. Cooder pictured the bird sitting on his knee and he transmitted that picture to the bird.

The bird’s head tweaked nervously from side to side, gazing at Cooder first with one bright black eye and then the other.

Here, birdie, birdie, birdie.

Cooder knew he could force the animal up onto his leg if he wanted to. But he didn’t like the feeling of fear animals gave off when he tried something like that. Their terror revolved right back into his own head and rattled him, and the bigger the animal, the harder they were to control. This was one big old black bird.

Here, birdie, birdie, birdie.

The crow took two quick hops nearer. Close enough to reach out and peck at Cooder’s work boot. Testing.

Still Cooder didn’t move. Instead, he concentrated on what the bird was seeing. He could see his own face, broad and dark from the sun, his blond hair greased back. He could make out the thick hairs on the backs of his fingers, draped between his knees. He looked like a giant to the bird, and he almost laughed out loud.

Here, birdie, birdie.

The crow crouched, tensing. Its wings started to spread. Its legs twitched. Cooder’s dark eyes grew bright.

Here, birdie.

Virgil eased to a stop at the end of Cooder’s driveway. He glanced at the name, painted in phosphorescent colors on the mailbox. The lettering was done freestyle in a flowing hand. Virgil wondered at the talent and steadiness required and tried to reconcile them with his picture of Cooder. Had Cooder done the painting? It would have surprised him if Cooder could still spell his name.

The house and grounds fit his image of the man better. The house was small, no more than one bedroom. Two windows flanked the entry, but the grass was overgrown
and no one had blazed a path to the door. The asbestos siding was chipped and broken. Each window revealed different colored paint on its trim, as though whoever the painter was, he’d run out of material or changed his mind in the middle of the job. An electrical line dipped low across the yard and Virgil wondered if it was powered up. It would be like Cooder to have forgotten to pay his bill and never have the power restored. It wasn’t as though he used electricity for hot baths.

Virgil pulled up alongside the house, feeling as though he had crossed some unseen boundary. While the front of the building was grassy and overgrown, the rear of the lot looked more like a gravel pit. The shells of two rusted automobiles faced each other like contestants in a perpetual game of chicken. An iron stove lay half-buried in the slope to Virgil’s left, and scattered pieces of flaking metal scratched their way to the surface as far as he could see.

Without warning, a crow flapped angrily past him, then away into the deep woods, startling him out of his reverie. Virgil took a moment catching his breath after its sudden appearance.

“Cooder?” he called.

“Back here!” Cooder’s voice echoed in the trees.

He rounded the corner and found Cooder sitting in a beat-up rocking chair. Virgil sauntered over and leaned on the rickety stair rail. Cooder seemed to be wearing the same clothes he’d seen him in last week. Virgil didn’t know whether Cooder never took them off, had several sets, or washed and wore the same set of clothes over and over. Any one of those answers seemed problematic. But Cooder didn’t smell as bad as before, so Virgil figured maybe he’d caught him at a good time.

“You see that crow?” asked Virgil.

Cooder smiled and nodded.

“Weird,” said Virgil. “Damn thing nearly ran into me.”

Cooder said nothing. His smile seemed stuck.

“You remember me almost running over you the other day, Cooder?” asked Virgil. He wasn’t sure exactly what Cooder might remember. For all he knew, whatever had set Cooder off the other day was now vanished like mist.

Cooder stared and smiled. “He saw you,” he said.

“Who?”

“The crow.”

Now it was Virgil’s turn to stare silently. Talking to Cooder was like trying to speak to someone over a bullhorn on a distant mountaintop. You always seemed to be getting echoes from a question you had asked sometime before.

“Yeah, well, he almost didn’t see me in time. I thought I had a new hood ornament.”

Cooder shook his head. “He heard you drive up.”

It sounded as though Cooder thought he knew what the damned bird was thinking. “So why did he swoop around the corner like that?”

Cooder shrugged. “Long time, Virg.”

“Not so long, Cooder,” Virgil reminded him. “I damn near ran over you the other day. Don’t you remember our little talk?”

Cooder frowned and Virgil could see that he didn’t.

“You remember,” said Virgil. “Over on the back side of South Eden? You were walking in the road. I gave you a sandwich.”

Cooder smiled. “BLT!”

“Yeah, Cooder. Remember, I told you to stay out of the road?”

Another frown. “Bad things.”

Now he was getting somewhere. “Yeah. That’s what you said. You remember.”

Cooder nodded.

“What did you mean you saw bad things, Cooder?”

“I seen bad things, Virg.”

“Yeah,” said Virgil, struggling to keep his frustration under control. “I know you did, Cooder. But you got to tell me what it was you saw. Did it have anything to do with No Name Creek?”

Cooder’s frown spread all the way across his face. It hurt to watch him think. “Where’s that?”

“The old concrete bridge. Right by where I almost hit you? Did you see something bad there?”

Silence.

Virgil stared around the backyard, wondering if Cooder had ever really
driven
any of the dead vehicles. Cooder had
had a driver’s license at one time, back when he still had half a brain.

“Don’t know nothing about no bridge, Virg.”

Shit. There went another of his screwy ideas.

“Bad things,” said Cooder, nodding to himself.

“But not at the bridge?”

“No.”

Cooder’s hands shook and he clenched them. But there was no violence in his face. Just worry, or maybe fear.

“Tell me what you saw, Cooder. What were the bad things?”

“Dark.”

“What’s dark?”

“In the dark place.”

Virgil thought of Audrey’s fragmented tale about the basement and Babs’s recurring nightmares.

Cooder seemed to drift away without even moving. His eyes went blank and his body sagged. “It’s awful dark. I don’t want to go back there, Virg.”

“Back where, Cooder?”

Another moment of silence.

“In the basement. It’s dark. It’s
real
dark. Don’t make me go in there. I been there before.”

The word
basement
tightened Virgil’s gut. Why the hell did everyone keep mentioning basements, cellars, dark places? Coincidence was one thing, but this was more than Virgil’s concept of coincidence could stand.

“You’ve been inside this basement? It’s someplace you’ve really seen?”

Cooder nodded.

“Was the Bock boy in the basement, Cooder? The Merrill boy?”

Those questions seemed to bring Cooder back a little closer to what Virgil thought of as the surface. “Who?”

“Zach Bock,” said Virgil. “The boy that disappeared last year.”

Cooder looked at Virgil as though he hadn’t seen him before. “Just me and the machine.”

“What machine?”

“I think maybe he’s alive, Virg,” said Cooder.

“What? Who?”

“The little boy. Sometimes I feel him.”

“Which little boy, Cooder?”

Cooder shook his head. Then he slapped his temple as though trying to loosen some stray memory clinging to his addled brain.

“It’s dark,” he said.

A little boy in a dark basement. Spirits finding bicycles. And a machine? What kind of machine? What the hell was that about?

“Where is he, Cooder? Where is the little boy?”

Cooder frowned and seemed to float away again. When he spoke again, even his voice sounded distant. It reminded Virgil of the sitting and he shivered in spite of the late-afternoon sun on his back.

An electrical charge seemed to jolt Cooder and when he spoke this time, his voice was harsh, raspy. “She’s going to put the mask on him.”

“What kind of mask?” asked Virgil, dreading the answer. “Why is she putting a mask on him?”

“Heavy.”

What kind of mask was heavy? “Help me out, Cooder. Tell me where the little boy is.”

Cooder shook his head. “I don’t know, Virg.” He focused on Virgil again, and Virgil found himself searching those impossibly dark eyes for more answers, but there were none there. He could see that Cooder wanted the visions out of his head as badly as Audrey Bock did.

“My medicine used to make it go away,” said Cooder, staring off through the trees. “Now it doesn’t help so much.”

Again he sounded like Audrey.

“You think it’s real, Cooder? The little boy? You understand what I mean by real?”

“Yeah, Virg. I know what real is.”

“And is he?”

A space.

“Yeah. I think he’s real.”

“But you don’t know where he is?”

“No.”

“Cooder, do you remember me coming here after the Bock boy disappeared?”

Cooder frowned.

“A year ago, Cooder. Remember me asking you questions?”

“No.”

“You said you didn’t know anything. You hadn’t been by the Bocks’ house in awhile.”

“I don’t know, Virg.”

“Cooder, do you remember Zach Bock? Do you remember what he looked like?”