Crucifax (28 page)

"Mallory…"

"C'mon, Mom won't be back for a while." She went to her room.

Jeff sat at the table and buried his face in his hands for a moment. When he got to her room, she was sitting on the edge of her bed sucking on a small pipe. Her room was filling with the sweet aroma of marijuana smoke, and she smiled up at him, tendrils of smoke curling from her nostrils.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," he said.

The room was dark except for a shaft of bluish gray from a light outside shining through the narrow opening between the curtains. When Jeff stepped inside, the bedroom door slowly closed on its own, as it sometimes did, leaving only a two-inch opening.

"Aw, c'mon." She offered the pipe to him.

Ignoring it, Jeff sat down beside her and said, "Mallory, don't go back. Please. Mace is… there's something wrong with him. He's dangerous. I saw what he did to Nikki Astin, and he's… Jesus, Mallory, he's deadly."

"Nikki Astin? Oh, he didn't hurt her, she was fine. He's my friend, Jeff," she said, her eyes taking on a slightly glazed look. She grinned. "I told you he talks about you, didn't I? He's always asking about you. He'd like you to come…."

Jeff shook his head, started to speak, but she stopped him.

"He told me… he said you care about me a lot."

"I do, Mallory." He put a hand on her arm and squeezed. "That's why I don't want you to go back. Something's wrong, something bad is happening. I know that probably sounds stupid, but—"

She leaned on him, giggling, and took another drag from the pipe.

"If you'd just come," she said, "you'd see how much fun we have, how…" She stopped to smile at him. Despite her smile, she looked ten years older than her age. She put an arm around his shoulders, leaned slowly toward him, and gently touched her lips to his cheek.

A small shiver of pleasure went through him at the touch of her mouth.

"You know what else Mace told me?" she whispered. "Mace told me—he said, just last night—he said that you have a crush on me." Her face split into a grin.

Jeff chilled.

"Is that true, Jeff?" She touched his ear with a fingertip.

He fidgeted beside her.

"Is it?"

"Mallory…"

"Mace knows things, you know. I mean, he knows things most people don't." She ran her fingers through his hair, kissed his cheek again, leaving her lips against his skin for a long moment. "He's a good friend, Jeff, he really is." Her other arm moved across his chest and touched his neck on the other side.

"Don't, Mallory." Jeff began to feel dizzy, disoriented, as if caught in a dream. He tried to move away from her, but she pulled him closer.

"Is Mace right?" she whispered. "He usually is, you know." She ran a finger down the bridge of his nose, touching his lips.

Jeff felt her breath on his cheek, his throat, felt her lips brush over his chin, up his cheek to his ear, where her tongue flicked the fleshy lobe….

"He said the reason you don't like me to see Kevin is that you're jealous," she giggled into his ear.

Although every ounce of strength seemed to have drained from his body, Jeff managed to pull away gently from Mallory.

"Stop," he whispered, his voice quavering. He stood and faced her as she took another drag on the pipe. "C'mon, let's put all this stuff back, Mallory," he said, gesturing toward her suitcase. "Okay?"

Mallory shook her head, slowly exhaling. "No, I'm gonna have to go soon." She put the pipe on the bed and stood before him, smiling. Her hair was still wet and had that familiar shampoo smell it had had that night she'd come to his bed two years ago. She untied the belt around her waist, and the robe fell open in front. The Crucifax rested between her breasts, glistening with moisture; she'd worn it in the shower. Mallory put her arms around his neck and moved close to him, her breasts pressing to his chest. "Why don't you come with me?" she whispered. "Please, Jeff? We can… do things…."

"
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 attention 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.