The Night Parade (7 page)

“Go home,” Deke said, turning around. “You shouldn't be here.” He ambled down the darkened hallway toward his bedroom, his hands dangling limply at his sides, the canvas of his broad, pallid back speckled with pimples and reddish striations. Like a ghost fading into a fog bank, Deke Carmody vanished into the darkness at the far end of the hallway.

David stood there in the living room for perhaps thirty seconds, listening to the grunting sounds of Deke climbing into his bed. Almost instantly the man began snoring.

David went to one of the windows and untied the curtains. They fell away from the pane, only to reveal a series of carpentry nails that had been pounded into the sill. The sight caused a thick lump to form at the back of David's throat. He went to the next window, untied the curtains, and found a similar display of carpentry nails there, too.

David returned to the bathroom, hung the towel back on the hook, and was about to turn and leave when he happened to glance down into the toilet. What he saw there caused him to freeze—and not solely in a halt of his movements, but he could literally feel his entire body suddenly grow cold.

The toilet bowl was filled with blood.

Not just a little bit, and not the superficial hue of a flesh wound or a nosebleed diluted in water. The blood in the bowl was the startling Christmas red of arterial blood, and as David stared at it, he thought he could see small clumps of fibrous material in it. There were spatters on the seat and some reddish spray down the side of the toilet tank. A few bright stars stood out sharply on the ecru tiles. One particular spill had been smeared by David's own shoe, most likely when he had first come in here to get the towel; he had inadvertently left a shoe print of blood on the pale green bath mat. His gaze levitated until he saw splotches of blood in the sink, too. Crimson droplets littered the countertop. The mirror was speckled with red teardrops.

How had he missed all this just moments ago? Had he been so focused on helping Deke that he had just overlooked it all? Given the condition of the bathroom, it seemed impossible.

He wanted to wash his face and hands—just looking at all that blood, not to mention the blackish clumps floating in it, made him feel unclean—but he wouldn't touch this sink. Instead, he went down the hall, into the kitchen, and scrubbed himself at the kitchen sink, where there was nothing more ominous than dirty dishes and empty glasses in the basin.

He considered going against Deke's wishes and calling 911 after all. He could request paramedics come out and take a look at Deke. Would they examine the blood, too? Deke hadn't looked hurt—he certainly hadn't been bleeding from anywhere that David could see—but that blood had come from
somewhere.

In the end, he decided not to call. Instead, he checked in on Deke before leaving the house. The big man lay like a beached whale on his mattress, one pasty leg dangling over the side of the bed. His snores were immense, thunderous rumblings. For a moment, David considered flipping on the lights . . . but he feared what that light might reveal of Deke's bedroom. Before he could chase the thought away, he imagined Deke sprawled out across a mattress sodden and black with blood, carpentry nails driven into the hardwood floor like booby traps.

“Deke?” It came out in a whisper.

Deke's only response was a guttural snort.

“Okay,” David said. “Good night.”

He left the house, thumbing the lock on the side door before pulling it closed behind him. The hunger he'd felt for hours had fled, leaving in its wake a sickening hollowness. He knew that when he went to sleep that night, he would see that bloody stew floating in Deke's toilet behind his eyelids. All of a sudden, the thing with the geese seemed trivial.

When he got home, Kathy met him in the foyer. In a pair of gold silk pajamas and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she was already made up for bed.

“Where've you been?”

“I stopped at Deke Carmody's house,” he said, stepping out of his shoes. “I caught him wandering around outside in his underwear.”

“What?
”

She followed him into the bedroom, and he told her what had happened as he undressed. Once he finished, he said, “What do you think? Should I call someone? Paramedics?”

“Maybe it's cancer.”

“What is?”

“All the blood,” Kathy said. “He could be sick.”

“Maybe. But what about the other stuff? The condition of his house and the nails in the windowsills?”

“Early stages of dementia?” Kathy suggested.

“Since when?”

“It's just a guess.”

“I don't feel good about this. Not at all. I should call an ambulance or something.”

“If he asked you not to call, then you should respect that.”

He considered this for perhaps five seconds.

Kathy said, “Maybe he's going through some medical issue and doesn't want anyone to know. You just happened to find him—”

“Standing outside in his underwear, yeah,” David finished.

“Does he have any family that you know of? Someone we could call?”

“I have no idea. Even if I knew that he did, I wouldn't know how to get in touch with anyone.”

Kathy sighed. “I'm just not sure what to tell you except that, for now, you should respect his wishes and not call anyone.”

“Yeah,” David said, though he wasn't sure he actually agreed.

“It's probably an illness. When was the last time you were over at his house?”

“Not for a while.”

“Isn't he on disability?”

“For falling off scaffolding at a construction site,” David said. “Nothing to do with cancer. Or dementia or anything like that.”
Or with a bowlful of blood,
was what he wanted to say. “It was so weird, Kath.”

“Then go check on him first thing in the morning. But if the man doesn't want you prying into his private business, you have to respect that.”

“Do I? I've got no responsibility beyond that?”

“No.”

“Even if it
is
dementia and he doesn't know what's good for him? And that he might be putting himself in harm and not even realizing it?”

“You're hypothesizing. Talk to him tomorrow and figure things out then. He might have a clearer head by then and be ready to talk to you. You'll have a better picture of what you're dealing with, too, and can make an informed decision.”

“Spoken like a true therapist,” he said, exhausted.

“That's what I am,” she said. “Wait till you get my bill.”

He smiled at her. “Okay. You're right.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I was,” he said. “Now, not so much.”

“I was going to go to bed. Would you rather I stay up with you for a while?”

“No, hon. Get some sleep.” He kissed her forehead.

In the kitchen, he began to fix himself a turkey sandwich, but then thought of the geese, and decided to go for some ham and cheese on white bread. It wasn't that he was hungry, but he knew he had to eat something. After the first bite, his hunger returned, and he not only devoured the whole sandwich, but a handful of Doritos and a Coke, too. Just as he finished, Ellie appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Hey, Little Spoon,” he said, getting up from the table. “What are you doing up so late?”

“Bad dream,” she said.

“Monsters?”

Solemnly, Ellie nodded.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's tuck you back in.”

The bedsheets were in a ball at the foot of the bed, the comforter on the floor. As Ellie climbed into bed, David gathered up the blankets, then tucked Ellie beneath them. He smoothed back the hair from her forehead, then planted a kiss there.

“You were there,” she said. “In my nightmare.”

“Was I the hero who saved the day?”

She shook her head. “No. You were crying. You were screaming, Daddy.”

He frowned and said, “Hon—”

“You were pulling on my arm and it hurt. But I didn't want you to stop. I didn't want you to let go. Because then the monsters would get me.”

He kissed her forehead a second time, then said, “There's no such thing as monsters, Ellie. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know. Come on.” She smiled, and he thought—strangely—that it was solely for his sake.

“Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”

When he stood, she said, “Good night, Dad.”

“Good night, Little Spoon. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

For the next hour or so, he sat on the couch watching an old movie, though he really wasn't paying much attention to it. He couldn't relax. A few times, his gaze drifted away from the TV, settling instead on some dark corner of the room. He saw the blood in Deke's toilet, watched those tiny bits of blackened fibers in Deke's sink take on life and begin twisting and jerking furtively in the thick pool of blood. After a while, he found he was sweating profusely.

He got up, shut off the TV, and locked the front door. The gauzy curtains over the bay windows were drawn, but a strange, dancing light beyond them was enough to attract his attention. He went to the windows and swept aside the curtains.

Deke Carmody's house was on fire. Pillars of flame belched from the windows, and there were black columns of smoke rising up in front of the moon. A number of neighbors stood outside on their lawns, watching. As David stared, two fire trucks turned onto Columbus, sirens wailing.

David was out of the house and running down the street a moment later, the cool night air speckled with rain freezing against his skin. But the soft rain did little to staunch the flames blooming from Deke's house. A wall of heat struck David halfway down the block, causing his eyes to water as he approached.

“Where is he?” he asked the neighbors who had gathered on the lawns across the street. “Where's Deke?”

“No one's seen him,” said Lucy Cartwright, holding her silk robe closed with two hands. She couldn't peel her eyes off the burning house across the street.

There were police officers here, too, and they waved away the more curious onlookers. David rushed over to one of them and shouted, “The owner of that house—has he been—”

“Step back,” directed the officer.

“There's a man inside that house!”

“Sir,” said the officer, placing a hand against David's chest. “I said to step back. Everyone's doing their job.”

“You don't—” David began, but was silenced as something exploded inside Deke's house. It was a deep-bellied
whump
, followed by a rolling wave of thick, hot air. One whole side of Deke's house blew out, spraying debris across the lawn and against the Bannisters' house next door. A ball of flame roiled out, casting the faces of the nearest onlookers in a pale yellow light. Cops and firemen quickly motioned for people to
get back, get back
.

After a time, it began to rain harder, but it did little to douse the flames. When the roof caved in, a second fireball belched up into the night sky. A few people cried out, and many more sobbed. By morning, Deke Carmody's house was nothing but a charred frame of struts and smoldering black boards, and it took firefighters much of the afternoon to locate Deke's remains.

T
he stranger staring back at him in the mirror had his eyes. Beyond that, there were no other similarities. His hair was freshly cropped and dyed black, his complexion sallow and seamed with hairline creases around the eyes, mouth, and nose. It was like staring at himself wearing the mask of another.

He cleaned up the dye and the shorn bits of hair, collecting them in the plastic shopping bag where he'd previously stowed Ellie's hair clippings. He cleaned the dye from the sink, a task that proved more monumental than he would have thought. He kept dumping wet globs of dye-blackened tissues down the toilet. He had gotten some dye on one of the bath towels, so he tucked that into the shopping bag, as well. After he finished, his fingertips looked as if he'd been printed at a police station.

When he stepped back into the room, he said, “So, what do you think of the new 'do?” He was grinning like a fool, trying to mitigate the seriousness of it all, but he stopped when he saw Ellie peeking through a part in the drapes. The smile fell from his face. “What are you doing?”

“There's people fighting outside, I think,” she said, quickly pulling her face away from the drapes. “A lady's out there crying.”

“Get away from there.”

He went to the window himself and peeled back a section of drapery. At first he could see nothing but the shiny chrome of the Oldsmobile's front grille, and he realized that he had parked it right out front out of habit instead of behind the Dumpsters as he had done the night before. He could see no one outside, and he was just about to turn away from the window when he heard the strong baritone of a man's voice barking some indecipherable order, followed by the pained mewl of a woman David could not see. The man's voice had sounded very close—possibly even in the room next door—but the woman had sounded even closer, and less muffled. David pressed his forehead against the glass and craned his neck. A shadow moved along the walkway outside his door. He heard scuffling along the tiny bits of sand and gravel that had collected in the cracks between the stamped pavers. David felt his bowels clench. For a moment, he couldn't remember where he'd hidden the handgun.

Then he saw the woman. She came ambling into his line of sight, moving in a defeated stagger behind the Oldsmobile and across the parking lot. She wore a plain white T-shirt that fell to midthigh and nothing else, as far as David could determine. Her hair was short, spiky, the color of pennies. She was sobbing. The lower half of her face was a slick and blotchy mess, and something dark had dribbled down the front of her T-shirt. It looked like blood.

The man with the baritone voice barked again, though his words remained indecipherable. This time, David caught a glimpse of him along the walkway, too—a robust fellow with a meaty forearm braided with wiry black hair. A bluish tattoo near his shoulder. Indeed, the man was standing in the doorway of the room right next door. His thick voice reverberated behind the wall of their room.

The woman paused beside the Oldsmobile's rear bumper and seemed to sway momentarily on her feet. As David watched, she brought up a hand and touched her mouth. When she looked at her fingers, she whined like some injured animal.

David jerked away from the window, letting the drapes swing back in place.

Ellie was standing on the far side of the room, as if determined to get as far away from the commotion outside as humanly possible. Her eyes were wide, staring, terrified. Somehow inquisitive, too. “Is that lady okay?” she asked. Despite the fear in her eyes, her voice was remarkably calm.

“It's not our business,” David said. “Let's just get our stuff and get out of here.”

“Right now?”

“Yes. Before the police show up.”

“But I haven't showered.”

“You'll have to go without.”

“But I didn't shower last night, either.”

“We don't have time for this, Ellie.”

In the bathroom, David took the Glock from the duffel bag and jammed it down the back of his pants. He shouldered the bag, then glanced at himself in the mirror. His hair was still wet, the dye job looking too dark and suspiciously artificial. Yet he wouldn't risk hanging around here, in the event someone called the cops on the sobbing woman in the parking lot.

He hurried back into the room. Ellie was standing by the front door clutching the suitcase handle in one hand, cradling the shoe box of bird eggs to her chest with the other.

“We go straight to the car,” David said, gripping the doorknob. He already had the car keys in his other hand at the ready. “Go to the driver's side and then slide over. You understand? I don't want you separated from me and going around to the other side of the car. Not for a second.”

Ellie nodded, her expressive eyes mostly shaded by the brim of her ball cap.

“Okay,” he said, licking his lips. “Okay. Okay.”

He swung the door wide and charged out into the daylight. Somewhere off to his right, the sobbing woman made a hitching sound, then went instantly silent. David didn't want to look, but he couldn't help himself—he stole a quick glance over his shoulder just as the woman was turning to look at him. The back of her T-shirt had ridden up, exposing a single pale buttock. There was an ugly bruise there, mean and purple with a greenish border. Glancing up at her face, David could see the blood spilling from her nose and mouth, black as motor oil. Her eyes possessed the distant gaze of the legally blind.

David yanked the car door open. “Go,” he said to Ellie, shoving her forward with one hand. “Get in.”

Ellie quickly got into the car, the suitcase banging against the door frame, careful not to crush her shoe box.

“Hey,” the woman said, her voice so unexpectedly calm, almost childlike, that it caused David to look in her direction again.

She stood facing him, her head cocked curiously at an angle now. Despite the blood that trickled from both nostrils and spilled down over her chin, hers was an expression of utmost serenity. Yet there was the foggy detachment in her eyes that immediately chilled David to the core, reminding him of Deke Carmody's similarly detached stare. It was as if she was looking right through him and at something visible only to her on the horizon.

“Hey,” she said again . . . and took a step in his direction. A bare foot scrudded over blacktop gravel. In the motel room behind her, the drapes over the window twitched.

“Daddy,” Ellie said from inside the car.

“Please,” the woman said. “Wait a minute. Please . . .” There was agony in her voice now.

David shook his head. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“I need help.” She took another step toward him. “I'm hurt. I need help. He won't . . . he won't . . .” She glanced briefly over one shoulder, at the window where the drapes continued to twitch and move. For a second, a man's wide, ghost-white face peered out before receding back into the darkness a moment later. David had time to glimpse a brutish, Cro-Magnon forehead and dark rodent eyes.

David switched his gaze back to the woman. He shook his head. “I'm sorry.”

“Daddy,” Ellie said again. She was leaning halfway out of the open door, watching the woman.

“
Please
,” the woman said, the word whining out of her as she proceeded to sob again.

David quickly got into the car and immediately slammed the door.

“Daddy, what's—”

The woman was at his window before he got the key in the ignition. Ellie cried out, startled.

“Please!” the woman shouted on the other side of the glass. When she slammed one palm against the window, David jumped and Ellie let out a strangled whimper. “I need help! Why won't you help me?”

“Daddy—”

“
Please!
”

David threw the car in Reverse and stomped on the accelerator. The Olds lurched backward, jerking David's head on his neck. Sharp, hot pain blossomed at the base of his head. David spun the wheel until the tires squealed and the whole car seemed to groan in protest. Then he dropped it into Drive. The car shuddered before its tires found purchase on the asphalt. David sped straight across the parking lot, daring to glance up at the rearview mirror only once. The woman had collapsed to the pavement and was rapidly shrinking as he put distance between them.