The 'Geisters (19 page)

She opened that up fast. “Ooo,” she said. “Birdy!”

It was a beautiful blue bird—with a dark blue head and pale blue wings. It was curled up in a bed of plastic straw. Ann touched it. It was so soft. Its little eyes were shiny and black. Also, it smelled.

Thunkity, went the bunk bed.

Ann looked up at the ladder. There was a pair of little legs, not much bigger than hers, standing on one of the top rungs. It wasn’t Philip—he was much bigger. Ann was still puzzling it out when the legs took one step, and another, and disappeared into the top bunk.

The whole bed swayed a bit. More than a bit.

Ann put her birdy down, and slid out from under the covers and got onto the floor.

She stepped back so she could get a good look on top.

“Hey,” she said.

The girl looked back. She was sitting up in the bed, grinning wider than ever. Her eyes looked kind of like the bird’s eyes in this light—all black and glittery. But friendly.

“Thank you for the present,” said Ann.

The grinning girl bounced a bit. She didn’t say anything, but Ann could hear Philip murmur something.

“It’s nap time,” said Ann. The girl nodded vigorously. She bounced some more, and looked down at where Philip would be. Ann couldn’t see Philip.

“You should go to your mommy,” said Ann.

The girl bent over and disappeared behind the edge of the top bunk.

There were no more
thunkities
.

Ann rocked from one foot and then the other. Of all her friends from the play group, Ann thought she liked this girl best. But this was very strange behaviour coming from her, all the same.

Why was she still here? Where was her mommy? Everyone else had gone off with their mommies.

Ann started to climb up the ladder. She wasn’t allowed to do this, but she had done so anyway a couple of times. Because, while she was a nice kid, she was also a curious kid. And the top bunk was great; there was a window up there for one thing. It was a great view, and once she had come up with Philip to look at the sunset through it.

It was dark and grey when Ann climbed up this time. Drops of water hung on the screen outside the glass.

The light made the grinning girl look like a black-and-white picture where she lay, cuddling Philip around his chest with her skinny arms. Philip was fast asleep, and the girl was holding him at his back. Her eyes were closed too, like she was sleeping. But Ann didn’t think she was sleeping; she was breathing too fast. It sounded like she had the sniffles. Philip shifted, and she shifted too, so she was holding him even tighter.

Ann stood on the rung right under the top rung.

“You need to go home,” she said, and the girl opened her eyes. They flashed dark, like little marbles.

“Find your own bed,” said Ann. “You go there.”

The girl pulled away, her arms pulling back from around Philip’s chest.

“He’s my brother, not yours,” said Ann. “Go home.”

The girl stood up on her little legs, so her head brushed the ceiling.

Then she reached down, and ran a finger over Philip’s cheek, and bent down, and stepped out the window.

Ann clambered onto the bed, and pushed her face to the glass to see where the girl had gone. Even though she squinted, she couldn’t tell. It had become even darker. The girl had gone somewhere into that. There was no way Ann would be able to tell where.

Philip stirred and blinked. Ann curled up beside him, and he put his arms around her. Ann didn’t think she’d get to sleep after all that commotion, but she did, all the same.

The Insect came to her, finally, in a campground outside of Bloomington, Indiana.

Ann had been following Penny’s advice—zigzagging across the country rather than making a straight-up run for it. She’d been mindful that the man with the buzz-cut could still be on her, even though he’d been scared off at Rosedale. Or Mister Sleepy had. But who knew if he might try and pick up her trail elsewhere?

So she stayed offline and kept her new phone battery-free. And when she needed to sleep, she looked for off-season campgrounds, where she could get a shower, but generally avoid even small groups of others.

The Winding River campground was where she ended up her second night on her meandering, under-the-radar trip home. And it was perfect for her needs. The campground was on a road lined with cornfields, nestled in a copse of trees between farms. It was not in fact on a river, but the owners had fashioned a pond that they stocked with fish. This far into the fall, they didn’t have many customers; at the lodge, they were happy to hook the van up to power and turn on the water in the bathroom for her. Ann thanked them, picked a spot far from the lodge, and cracked a bottle of some interesting-looking California zinfandel, to watch the sunset.

She hadn’t actually thought to pick up anything to eat. The wine hit her hard as a result. She was asleep before the stars came out.

At midnight, Ann woke up, throat torn with reflux bile, on the little bench beside the kitchenette. She had not even put up the roof to open up the bunks to sleep properly, so her neck hurt, too.

None of that had woken her up, though.

The cab light was on.

It was on because the passenger side door was hanging open, up front.

There was someone in the passenger seat. Wasn’t there?

Yes. The door shut and the light went out, which meant that the shape she saw, the head bobbing on the thin neck, the tangle of hair . . . that had to be real, because the door had shut. And someone had to shut the door.

“I’ve got a gun,” lied Ann. She hoped the hoarseness in her voice overrode the quaver.

The only answer was a squeaking sound, of flesh rubbing against painted metal perhaps. Ann peered forward. No good. Too dark.

Ann reached across the miniature counter top, found the light switch. A little fluorescent bar over the hotplate stove flickered to life.

The passenger seat was empty now, so far as she could see. Ann swallowed hard—her mouth felt like it was full of chalk—and she crept toward it to confirm, grabbing the neck of the wine bottle.

And as she did, she sighed. It seemed as though the seat were empty. She put her hand on the headrest, and peered over to be sure, and she swallowed even harder—because she hadn’t seen the thing that was there.

It was a bird—its head cricked in toward its breast. Its back was bright yellow, its wingtips black and grey, a tiny black crown on its head. It was surely dead.

The squeaking sound resumed. It seemed to be coming from all around her. It took her far too long, she thought later, to place it.

It was the sound of a finger drawing across the windshield of the van; making words in the dew.

STOP DAWDLING

TAKE US HOME TOMORROW NIGHT

I WILL HELP

There were four places to cross the border that would take Ann to Ian Rickhardt’s place in Niagara. The most obvious one was Niagara Falls. East, she might have crossed at Buffalo. West was the crossing between Detroit and Windsor; roundabout, but still convenient.

Ann chose the farthest; the little city of Port Huron, not far from Flint, Michigan and kissing distance from Sarnia.

It was a long drive from Bloomington. And Ann stewed as she made it. She was a Canadian citizen, driving an Alabama-plated vehicle. She might have to surrender that at the border. She had heard stories about border officials taking a car apart to see if it was running drugs or weapons. She might wind up in custody.

She had read about exit searches. It was something the U.S. border guards could do if they wanted, for any reason they chose. Once they stopped you . . . they could do anything they wanted.

She knew she could disappear under such circumstances.

She’d hoped to make it by dinnertime, but the weather wasn’t with her. A lashing rainstorm hit at Fort Wayne, so bad that she had to pull off into a rest stop for almost an hour, and traffic crawled along the interstate. She stopped in Lansing four hours later for a rest and something to eat.

By the time she hit the city limits of Port Huron, it was closing on midnight, and the storm had tapered somewhat, so she could make some progress. But her windshield wipers were on high and the heater was blowing full on.

As Ann drove through on the I-69 and the wind picked up, she began to wonder just what kind of help the Insect was going to provide.

She had to slow up on the on-ramp to the I-94; a transport truck was pulling off to the side, leaving just enough room for her to get around. As she passed it, she thought she saw something sparking underneath. She kept going.

She merged onto an empty I-94 and thunder rumbled. Had that been a lightning strike somewhere, reflected from the truck? Signs indicated the upcoming Blue Water Bridge. Lightning flashed again and in the aftermath, it seemed as though the world had gone dark.

It took her an instance to realize that it had. She flashed her high beams on. Ahead was a small building at the roadside, and as she passed it, she saw in her rearview that someone had stepped outside, was waving a glowing blue cone.

Ahead, another figure stepped into view, waving her to stop.

She braked and pulled off to the side.

The figure was in rain gear; she came up to the window of the van and rapped on it with her flashlight.

“Step out of the car, Ma’am!” It was a woman, thick-featured. About Ann’s age.

Ann said that she would. But when she turned back from unbuckling her seatbelt, the woman was gone.

There was a
thump!
on the roof of the van. Ann caught a movement in her side-view, as a glowing flashlight rolled off the top. An instant later, the woman fell too.

Ann looked outside. More figures were running over from the building. The woman on the ground wasn’t moving.

There was a squeaking sound then, and Ann looked around.

Written in the growing condensation on the windshield:

DRIVE.

Ann put the van into gear and drove. Ahead, she could barely make out a dark bank of toll booths; as she approached, the bar rose in front of her.

She heard a muffled shouting sound that might have been screams as the rain relented, momentarily, under the awning. Then the rain hit again and she pushed on across the dark bridge.

Ann found she was barely breathing; the cabin of the van was getting cold—just as it had been at Christmas, when the Insect killed her parents and paralyzed her brother.

She had been waiting for this to happen—for thousands of miles, she’d been waiting for the Insect to manifest on the road, maybe in the midst of a traffic jam as she hit rush hour outside some Midwestern metropolis. There had been times, she had to admit, that she had wanted it to.

Now, it was just her in the van. There were no crowds of people outside; no lines of cars waiting to make it through the checkpoint. She wondered if the swerving truck on the on-ramp might have been part of the cause of that. She wondered what the Insect had done to the traffic approaching the checkpoint farther back on the I-94, to keep it back, then waited until the last American crossed into Canada, before cutting the power.

Whatever it had done, Ann felt coldly certain the Insect wasn’t killing her. It had never been killing her, it had never really tried to, and it wasn’t going to start tonight.

Lightning flashed, throwing the suspension cables over her head into a sharp relief. Ahead, she could see the Canadian customs checkpoint. Like the toll booth she’d passed through, these were dark—except for the tops of what looked like streetlight poles. There, something sparked.

Cameras
, Ann thought, feeling the certainty in her gut.
The cameras are shorted out
.

“You heard my thoughts,” she said aloud as she accelerated toward the Canadian border. “You heard how fucking scared I was—to be coming at the border with Alabama plates and the face of the Mile High Widow. So you helped.”

At some point, Ann had stopped muttering and started shouting.

As her headlights illuminated the Canadian border checkpoints, she swallowed her words and sat straight. Ann knew she should just fly through here, faster even than she’d passed the toll both—that’s what the Insect told her to do.

But she couldn’t quite make herself. She’d been terrified of this encounter; but something in her, some base programming, made her slow down.

She rolled up to one of the dark booths. Someone was inside it—she could just make them out through the window, which sat about a foot higher than her line of sight. The booth was open, and a hand clutched the edge of it.

The hand disappeared as she rolled by slow.

Ann knew that she should have just pushed through. She had a clear run, if the cameras were all down. No one would know she crossed; her Alabama-state camper van would be hers.

She rolled her window down, and craned her neck to see.

Behind the counter, the agent—it was hard to tell much other than by the close-cropped haircut, it was probably a man—sat bolt upright in his chair. He looked to be staring straight at Ann.

“Are you—okay? Do you need help?”

The man made a high noise that sounded like it was coming from the back of his throat.

“Go through, Ma’am,” he said.

Ann shivered, as an icy breeze passed between them.

“Go on.” His voice was high. “Go through fast. Get help.”

Ann took that as a pass. Through she went, past the dark secondary search, where she noted sickly four cars and a minivan were pulled over, to have their belongings searched. She didn’t stop this time, but kept to the path—swerving only once, to avoid a garbage can that had blown into the road.

The weather cleared up as she passed through Sarnia. The streetlights came on again. In the oncoming lane, police cars sped toward Port Huron, but until Ann had passed a few on-ramps, she was blessedly alone on the highway.

As she drove, she wondered just how alone she was. Had the Insect remained at the border crossing, wreaking mayhem as was its wont? Had it released her, now, to make the long drive past Sarnia, through London, and eventually southeast?

An hour out, she found a highway rest station, and pulled into it to get some gasoline—order some coffee. There were TVs on in the central dining area, tuned to CTV’s news channel. None of the half-dozen or so late-night travellers clutching their travel mugs paid it any heed, and why should they? The weather scroll showed cool but clear skies ahead; the stock market seemed to be ticking along normally; and as for news?

It looked as though the main story this morning was about the Prime Minister, and a couple of senior ministers, and judging from the stock footage, the Alberta oil sands. Ann wasn’t sure. She had been on the road, not paying attention to Canadian politics.

There was nothing about the Mile High Widow. Not a hint of any trouble at the border.

But there probably wouldn’t be, not yet.

Tim Horton’s was the purveyor of caffeine and carbs at the rest stop. Ann didn’t care for their coffee but made an exception. It was rich and stimulating, and she thought she could drink a gallon of it if she had to.

And she had to, because there would be no night spent at a campground tonight.

Soon, the CTV screens would light up with news about what had happened at Port Huron. At the very least, about a dead or badly hurt U.S. border guard. Possibly about a terrible auto and truck crash on the I-94.

Maybe, about hell opening up at Canada Customs and Immigration.

Whatever the totality of that was—Rickhardt would know that she was back in Canada, and where she was coming from.

And then . . .

Then he might just start hurting Philip.

Ann finished her coffee, tossed it away and headed to the rest room. She’d showered and cleaned up at the campground the day before, and that showed. If she’d had to, she could have put on a good face at the border.

Even now—after everything, Ann congratulated herself silently.

She didn’t look desperate at all.