Prowlers - 1 (11 page)

His translucent skin was yellow, almost as blond as his hair, but Jack was transfixed by his eyes. The rest of Artie's body and his clothes were transparent. So were those blue eyes. But looking through those eyes he could not see the whiskey bottles or the mirror. He saw something else. Somewhere else. And suddenly Jack didn't want to look anymore.

"You're a ghost," he whispered.

"You got it in one, amigo," Artie told him. "You're right. I'm dead; not that I want you to remind me of it all the time. I know this has gotta be tough for you, man. I know that. Right now your mind is doing backflips trying to figure out if you're nuts, if I'm really here, and how the heck that can be if I am. Okay, it'd be nice if maybe you were a little glad to see me, bro, 'cause at least we can communicate like this even if, okay, my appetite has changed a little. But I understand, truly I do. It'd be like, okay, I've always believed in conspiracies and you haven't, so it'd be like the CIA walking up to you and saying 'Guess what, Jack? Artie was right. There were three shooters in Dallas. The U.S. government did import cocaine into this country to undermine urban areas and keep minorities down.' I totally get what your situation is right now. All right, as much as I can, considering I'm on this side. But, y'know, given the chance to trade, bro, I think I'd rather be in your shoes."

Artie. Jack's mind whirled as the patter unfurled, the staccato speechifying he had come to both dread and love so much. This really is Artie.

Through the terror and confusion he felt, a tiny smile played on his lips. 'Artie?"

"Jack?" Artie mimicked good-naturedly.

Jack shook his head in disbelief.

"You look like crap in that suit, by the way," Artie said. "It's too small for you, it's wrinkled, and

it's so not you. That was the best you could do for my wake? What are you gonna wear to the funeral, like, a clown suit or something? Big shoes and all?"

Jack chuckled. "Oh, my God, I'm insane. That's all there is to it. I'm out of my mind."

"You know you're not," Artie told him. "It's me."

"What... I mean, am I always going to be able to see you?"

"I don't know," Artie said, and he looked puzzled, the weird space behind his eyes seeming to flash with white light. "But you can see me now. You, and apparently only you, 'cause I tried to talk to some people on the street, but nobody saw me."

"Molly?" Jack asked.

"Not Molly," Artie said quickly. "Never Molly. I'm dead, Jack. As far as she knows that's that. It wouldn't be fair to her to know I'm around, watching and all. She's gotta live."

"But you came to me," Jack said tentatively, mind still spinning. "Not that I'm not glad, but—"

"You weren't my lover, Jack," Artie said. "Not that I don't think you're a superb specimen of the male species. Besides, you were thinking about me so much that I could feel it, like it was pulling on me, and I knew I could talk to you if I just thought about it hard enough. I knew you were the only one I could come to, Jack. I need to tell people about the things that..."

A ripple passed through the specter behind the bar and Artie seemed to be in pain. For a millisecond, Jack saw his wounds again, and then they were gone.

"I have to warn people about the things that killed me," the ghost said. "You have to warn them, Jack. You have to do something."

"Things?" Jack asked, even more confused, mind still trying to catch up to reality, to make sense of a world where ghosts were real, where he could speak to the dead.

"Things," Artie echoed, nodding. He narrowed those otherworldly eyes and focused on Jack.

"Monsters, Jack.

"They're called Prowlers."

CHAPTER 5

Molly Went to Artie's funeral alone. When she woke up that Thursday morning she found her mother sprawled across the sofa in the living room with VH-1 still on the television and several empty beer bottles on the rickety coffee table. Another bottle lay on the carpet on its side; its contents had spilled out to create a foul-smelling stain that would likely never come out. If Molly's mother ever made any effort to get it out. More than likely, Molly herself would try later in the day, or possibly tomorrow, but by then it would be too late. The stain, and the stink, would have sunk into the carpet forever.

Molly couldn't take the time to worry about it this morning. She had to go and watch them bury her boyfriend. When she left the apartment, taking the rusty Dodge Omni without asking, her mother was still unconscious on the sofa.

It was chilly at the cemetery. Molly wore a navy blue skirt, a white blouse, and a navy blue jacket, an outfit she had bought to wear for college interviews, paid for with money she earned behind the counter at the convenience store two blocks away from her house. It had been robbed twice in the eighteen months she worked there, but fortunately never on her shift.

Though the sun shone brightly down on the marble and granite headstones and on the mourners gathered around the open grave and the casket above it, Molly was cold. She needed a heavier jacket, but did not feel that either her thick winter coat or the leather jacket Artie had bought her for Christmas would have been appropriate. So she clenched her teeth and tried not to shiver, and she studied the faces around her so that she would not have to look at the casket or the grave. She stood with the Carrolls only a few feet away from Father Hughes. The priest's lips moved. Though he was clearly speaking, praying, none of the words made sense to Molly.

Her tears had been flowing since the ceremony at church had started. There was no eulogy—no one who might have delivered one felt capable of doing so without breaking down completely. Molly had wept in silence all through the funeral mass. Now, as those gathered said their last good-byes, her breath hitched and she cried all the harder.

Almost angrily, she wiped at her eyes with a handkerchief that a woman—one of Artie's cousins, she

thought—had handed her. She let herself feel the cold, let it get into her bones, tried to imagine it freezing her tears to icy streaks on her face. Her breathing slowed, and Molly began to get control of herself. The priest was not done yet, but it was over. There at the edge of Artie's grave, that was the end.

Mrs. Carroll laid a comforting hand on her shoulder, and Molly looked up to see her own resolve reflected on the woman's face. "You can't escape pain," Hal Ulrich, her guidance counselor, had told her one day when they were talking about her mother. "But you can tame it."

Molly knew that was what she had to do, was already doing. Mrs. Carroll seemed to be doing

the same thing. Artie's father, on the other hand, was hiding from his pain. His face was emotionless, sculpted in stone, his eyes rimmed red but dry. He might crack at any second.

Then there was Jack.

What is going on in his head? Molly wondered as she glanced over at him. Jack stood with his sister and Bill Cantwell on the opposite side of the grave, amid a crowd of other people, most of whom Molly did not recognize. Jack looked like hell—worse than she imagined she did—as though he had not slept at all the night before. At church, Jack had approached her, spoken softly to her, but he had been skittish. A couple of times he seemed about to tell her something, but then he just shook his head.

At the cemetery, he was worse. Molly kept trying

to catch his eye, but only once had he even noticed her. Instead, Jack gazed off into nothing, eyes not focusing on anyone or anything. Several times she spotted him muttering to himself. Molly told herself he must have been saying a prayer, and hoped she was right.

The priest finished and the mourners gathered even closer around the casket. They passed by, one by one, silently saying their last good-bye to Artie. Many of them pulled a flower or two out of the expensive arrangements that were lined up around the grave site, then dropped them on top of the casket. Molly did not take a flower. She waited until Artie's parents had walked past the grave and started back toward their car, and then she closed her eyes.

Good-bye, Artie, she thought. I love you. Nobody could ever make me smile like you.

When she opened her eyes again, Jack was standing in front of her.

"Jack!" she said quickly, heart speeding up. "God, you spooked me."