One-Eyed Jack

by

Lawrence Watt-Evans

Copyright © 2011 by Lawrence Watt Evans

All rights reserved

Published by Misenchanted Press

www.misenchantedpress.com

Cover art by Kyrith Evans

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal use
only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.
If you would like to share this book with another person, please
purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If
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purchased for your use, then you should return to your favorite
eBook seller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting
the author's efforts.

This is a work of fiction. None of the
characters and events portrayed in this novel are intended to
represent actual persons living or dead.

OTHER BOOKS BY LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

The Nightmare People

Among the Powers

Shining Steel

THE FALL OF THE SORCERERS

A Young Man Without Magic

Above His Proper Station

THE ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

The Wizard Lord

The Ninth Talisman

The Summer Palace

THE OBSIDIAN CHRONICLES

Dragon Weather

The Dragon Society

Dragon Venom

LEGENDS OF ETHSHAR

The Misenchanted Sword

With A Single Spell

The Unwilling Warlord

Taking Flight

The Blood of a Dragon

The Spell of the Black Dagger

Night of Madness

Ithanalin's Restoration

The Spriggan Mirror

The Vondish Ambassador

The Unwelcome Warlock

THE LORDS OF DUS

The Lure of the Basilisk

The Seven Altars of Dûsarra

The Sword of Bheleu

The Book of Silence

WAR SURPLUS

The Cyborg and the Sorcerers

The Wizard and the War Machine

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

Crosstime Traffic

Celestial Debris

In the Blood

The Final Folly of Captain Dancy

& Other Pseudohistorical Fantasies

Dedicated to

Roger MacBride Allen

for convincing me that

publishing wasn't that hard.

Chapter One

It started with a dream. It usually
does.

There was a street, broad and
straight, with sidewalks on both sides, and wide green lawns, and
tidy little houses set back behind those lawns. A bright summer sun
was setting behind the houses on one side, and shadows were
stretching out across the lawns. The sunlight sparkled from drops
of water flung up by sprinklers in the shadows, and the sidewalks
were turning orange in the sunset. A dog was barking somewhere, and
a hammer was thumping; kids were riding bikes along the sidewalks,
the shadows of the spokes flickering across the grass.

A family was gathering for supper on a
glassed-in porch; a white-haired couple sat side by side on the
porch next door. The unnatural colors of TV screens flickered
behind a dozen windows.

I didn’t recognize the street; it
wasn’t anywhere I had seen before, either sleeping or
awake.

And then, as the sun dropped out of
sight, I was watching a particular house, one where the paint on
the garage door was starting to peel, and where a man’s voice was
shouting inside closed windows. I listened, and I could make out
the words.

“
...worthless little creep,” he said. “You, too, missy – you
aren’t any better. I see the way you look at me, you think your old
man’s a drunken loser, but whose fault is that, huh? I was
doing
fine
until you two were born! Then all of a sudden your mother
didn’t have any time for me, she had to spend all her time cleaning
up after
you
two.
Couldn’t keep a job, either – she had to keep running home to wipe
your noses. Couple of little retards!”

I was looking in the window then,
where a big man gone soft was leaning over a boy of twelve or so,
jabbing his finger at the kid. The boy was sitting in a chair by a
kitchen table that held three empty beer bottles. A little girl was
curled up in the corner beside the refrigerator, staring up at the
man, and a woman in a cheap house-dress was standing at the kitchen
sink ignoring it all, her shoulders hunched.

The boy was glaring up at his father
defiantly.

“
You want to say something
to me, Jack? You got something you want to say, Jackie-boy?” the
man bellowed.

The boy didn’t speak.

“
What’s the matter, you
can’t talk? Can’t remember how to speak English?” The man
straightened up.

“
I don’t have anything to
say to you,” the boy whispered.

“
No? You can’t be civil to
your own father?”

The boy didn’t reply.

“
Get out of here, then!
Get out of my face, and stop reminding me I’m saddled with your
useless little butt!” He gestured wildly.

The kid got out of his chair and fled,
out of the kitchen, through the living room, into the hallway,
where he glanced at the stairs, then turned the other way and
stormed out the front door.

He didn’t slam it, though. He started
to swing it hard, then looked back toward the kitchen and caught
himself. He stopped the door, then pulled it gently closed until
the latch clicked.

Then he paused on the front steps – no
porch on this house – and looked around at the twilight, at the
looming black shapes of trees and the glowing squares of windows
and the fading gray lawns and sidewalks. A streetlight buzzed and
lit, and yellow light chased the darkness away from half a dozen
yards.

The boy turned the other way and
walked out into the darkness, and that was when I woke up in my own
bed, in my seventh-floor apartment, staring at the ancient stain on
the ceiling while the clock-radio played a Jordin Sparks
song.

I sighed, turned off the alarm, got
up, and headed for the bathroom.

I didn’t know what the
dream was about. I didn’t know who the kid was, or where the street
was, or why I was seeing it. I didn’t know, and really, I didn’t
particularly
want
to – but it was a safe bet I was going to find out. Maybe not
right away, but eventually that kid would become my business. The
people I dreamed about like this always did, one way or
another.

It had been awhile since I’d had one
of those dreams, but I could tell this was one, that it wasn’t just
my subconscious messing with me. I can’t explain how I knew, but I
knew.

These dreams were one of my special
little talents. I had a couple of others, but we’ll get to
those.

I liked it better when I had normal
dreams, where I was flying around like Superman, or standing naked
at the chalkboard back in high school, or falling into bed with
Catherine Zeta-Jones. I liked it better when my dreams didn’t make
any sense. Those dreams might be scary or frustrating or confusing,
but they were just dreams.

The dreams about strangers doing
ordinary things, though, those were more. Those were real. I was
seeing things that were actually happening, or had actually
happened, or were going to actually happen. The strangers were real
people, and sooner or later I was going to meet them in real life.
That was when the dreams would stop, when I met the person I had
dreamed about and had to deal with him in the waking world. We were
going to be associated in some way that would make a connection
between us, something more than a casual greeting. That stranger
was going to change my life somehow – or at least, that was how it
had worked the half-dozen times I’d had dreams like this
before.

The nature of that connection, that
change, might be anything, good or bad, and I didn’t really know
why I had the dreams days, or months, or even years in advance, but
I had a theory. My guess was that whatever was going to happen
between us would create a psychic event that resonated backward
through time to my sleeping brain.

It was all part of what my history
teacher had done to me in eleventh grade, what she had called her
four additions to my education, and I could have just said it was
magic, but I kept trying to make some sense of it, to figure out
how the magic worked, and resonances from my future self seemed
more reasonable than just calling it prophetic visions.

Why this stuff didn’t resonate forward
as well I didn’t know, but it didn’t – or at least, it never had
yet. Once I met someone I’d dreamed about, met him in the waking
world, that was it, I was on my own, with no more supernatural
knowledge, no more visions or premonitions or clairvoyance. Oh, I
would still see those things normal people don’t see, the things
I’d rather not see; that part of Mrs. Reinholt’s gift was
permanent. But I wouldn’t have any more dreams about a particular
individual after I’d met him face to face.

I just wished that whoever or whatever
sent me these dreams would make them a little more informative. All
these rules I’ve just explained were things I’d worked out or
guessed at from the half-dozen example I had; no one had ever told
me what was happening, or how any of this worked. It was entirely
possible that I had some of the rules wrong, or that they could
change without warning. I just didn’t know.

I was grumbling about it while I
shaved and dressed. Every previous round of dreams had meant a
change in my life, usually a change for the worse, and I didn’t
feel any need for more changes. My life sucked quite enough as it
was.

I tried to remember more details of
the dream; was there anything in there that might tell me where it
happened, or when, or who Jack was? The whole thing had taken place
on a pleasant suburban street, but not too fancy – no McMansions,
no gated community, just a bunch of tidy little ranch houses and
Cape Cods. It wasn’t anywhere I recognized. From the architecture
I’d say the neighborhood was built in the 1950s, but that didn’t
narrow it down much.

If it was in the Washington metro
area, where I was, it was a part I’d never seen. There were a few
streets in Arlington and Silver Spring that were roughly similar,
but I knew it wasn’t an exact match for any of them. The terrain
was flatter than most of the older Maryland suburbs, for one thing.
I didn’t think it was local.

That left a lot of
possibilities.

I was pretty sure from how
green the lawns were, and how big the trees were, that it wasn’t in
a desert anywhere – Phoenix and El Paso were not among my top
candidates. The houses didn’t look quite right for New England,
either. It
felt
like someplace in the east, not California or Hawaii or
Colorado, but I couldn’t be sure of that. There were no palm trees,
no pines. The cars – was there anything useful about the cars?
Could I get the state from the license plates?

I didn’t remember seeing cars. Suburbs
always had cars, but I hadn’t noticed any. I growled at how useless
my dream-self could be, rinsed my razor, toweled off my face and
hands, and headed for the kitchen.

Kitchenette, really. I wasn’t exactly
living in the lap of luxury. I had a decent little apartment on
Maple Avenue, about a mile from the District line and the Takoma
Metro station, but the key word is “little.”

Ever since the disasters
back in high school I try to tell the appropriate people when I
have one of my special dreams – police, social workers, parole
officers, whoever. Not that it does any good. This time, though, I
couldn’t think who to call, other than my friend Mel, who always
wants to know when I’m dreaming this stuff. A kid named Jack, a kid
with a verbally abusive father, took off; who should I call
about
that
? I
didn’t have a last name, didn’t have a location, didn’t have a
date, didn’t know whether the kid had already come back.

I’d just have to wait until I had more
to go on, and in the meantime I had a long day at the store ahead
of me. The dream had distracted me from hitting the snooze button
the way I usually do, so I had time for a real breakfast, for once,
and I concentrated on that, not on this mysterious Jack who was
destined to change my life.