The Night Parade (9 page)

“No.” She pulled away from him.

“It's not safe.” He looked back at the diner. The waitress was watching them through the glass now.

“You're a
liar!
” she screamed at him . . . and then collapsed to the ground.

He dropped quickly to his knees and raised her head with a thumb beneath her chin. The pain on her face wounded him, but he refused to look away. Instead, he embraced her, squeezed her tight. She tensed up within his arms . . . but then sobbed against him as her whole body went limp.

“Shhh,” he said. “It's okay. But we need to get in the car now. We need to get out of here, Ellie. Do you understand? It's important we get out of here right now.” He kissed the hot, damp side of her face, and repeated the question in her ear:
“Do you understand?”

She withdrew from his arms and slouched against the side of the car.

The waitress was still watching them from behind the diner's plate-glass windows.

David said, “If you don't get in the car, Ellie, I'm going to smash those bird eggs. Do you understand me?”

“No,”
she sobbed. Then she hugged him again. He hugged her back with one arm, not taking his gaze from the waitress in the window.

“I want to know what's going on,” she cried.

Briefly, David closed his eyes. “Okay. I'll tell you. I'll explain it all. Just get in the car first so we can get out of here and get someplace safe. We need to get someplace safe first, Ellie. And then I'll tell you.”

In the end, he wasn't sure how long they remained like that, kneeling in the gravel parking lot of the 1950s-style diner, the waitress watching them through the wall of plate-glass windows, but by the time they ultimately climbed into the car and drove away, it seemed like an eternity had passed. His only hope was that the scene they had inadvertently caused had kept the waitress's eyes off the television broadcast.

 

D
avid poked his head into Ellie's bedroom. Kathy and Ellie were propped up against a mountain of pillows, Ellie's head in Kathy's lap. David leaned against the door frame and watched them both in silence. After a time, Kathy looked up, found his eyes on her, and smiled wearily at him. She mouthed the words “
Is she asleep?
” to him, because she couldn't see their daughter's face. David nodded.

Without waking her, Kathy maneuvered Ellie's head off her lap. She pulled the sheet up over the girl, kissed the side of her head, then joined David out in the hallway.

“How is she?” he asked.

“As good as she can be,” Kathy said. “Better than most, I would suspect.”

“She's always been tough.”

“She has,” Kathy agreed. “She didn't even want to talk about it. Do you think that's bad?”

“Bad?”

“Like, should we be concerned?”

“I don't know.”

Kathy began to cry, quietly and with a hand covering her mouth.

It was something she did so rarely that it was unexpected, and he stood there staring at her for several seconds before drawing her into an embrace. They hugged each other in the dark hallway for a time. He could feel her heartbeat against his chest.

“I think she should talk to a therapist,” Kathy said once she dried her eyes on his chest and separated herself from him. “A counselor or whatever.”

“If you think that's best.”

“I'm just worried what she saw . . . what's been going on . . . I don't like that she's not talking about it.”

“It just happened today, Kath. Let's talk about it with her tomorrow. Maybe she'll be ready tomorrow.”

Kathy nodded, swiping a thumb under one eye.

David reached out and quietly closed Ellie's bedroom door. Then he nodded his head in the direction of the living room, where the TV was on with the volume turned low. Kathy followed him, her bare feet shushing along the floor. David suddenly felt exhausted, like he could shut his eyes and not open them for a month.

“I need a drink,” Kathy said, going through the living room and into the kitchen. “You want one?”

“All right,” he said, easing down onto the sofa. Anything to soothe his nerves. He glanced at the TV but had no interest in whatever was on.

Kathy returned with two glasses of white wine. She handed one to him.

“Come here,” he said, patting the cushion beside him.

Kathy sat. She took a sip of her wine, made a smacking sound with her lips, then leaned her head against David's shoulder.

“How much did she actually see?” he asked after a while.

“I'm not exactly sure. Her teacher said she was right there when it happened.”

“Any word on the girl?”

“None yet,” Kathy said. “The last bit of news was that she was still in critical condition. They took her to Hopkins.” She glanced up at him, her breath warm and already smelling of wine. “It's the same thing that happened to those students of yours, isn't it?”

“They weren't my students,” he said. “They just attended the college. I didn't even know them.”

“But it's the same thing, isn't it?”

“I'm not a doctor, Kath.”

“It's what happened to Deke, too.” It wasn't a question this time. She was running through all the incidents in her head now, he could tell, replaying them as if their sum would now total the blueprint to some terrible plan unleashed.

David had thought about Deke every day since that night he'd found him wandering down Columbus Court in his underwear. It was impossible not to, since Deke's house—or what remained of Deke's house, following the fire—could be seen from their front windows. Two days after the fire, David had spoken with a police detective about the incident—he told the detective about finding Deke in his underwear in the middle of the street, and about ushering him back into his home. He spoke of the disruptive condition of the house, the strange, detached way Deke had been speaking, and about the massive amounts of blood he'd discovered in Deke's bathroom. The detective, a pock-faced fellow in his late thirties, jotted down notes without the slightest inkling of emotion. When David had finished his story, the detective set down his notepad and asked if anyone else on Columbus Court had exhibited any strange behavior lately. David said no, and asked what that had to do with anything. The detective shrugged and commented that he had been getting a lot of reports concerning strange behavior lately. More than the usual stuff, he'd said. When David asked him to elaborate, the detective was reluctant. When David pushed the issue, the detective told him it was nothing and that he shouldn't have brought it up. It hadn't been until later that evening, after speaking with the detective, as he'd lain in bed staring at the darkened ceiling while Kathy snored gently beside him, that David's mind had returned to the ice cream man. It occurred to him that no one on Columbus Court had ever learned exactly what had happened to Gary, the ice cream man. The police had taken him away, the Freez-E-Friend truck had been towed, and that had been the end of it. As if it had never happened.

David considered mentioning this to Kathy now, adding one more piece to the peculiar and morbid puzzle that she was now so obviously assembling in her head, but he ultimately decided against it. A young girl had fallen ill at Ellie's school today, coughing up blood while staggering around the playground during recess as if lost, before collapsing on the ground in a series of convulsions. Ellie's teacher had told Kathy that a handful of students, including their daughter, had witnessed the whole thing. He didn't need to frighten Kathy any further, augmenting her fear with reminders of all the strange events that had been happening over the past nine months. As it was, he could feel her trembling against him now.

“Ellie's teacher said Ellie wasn't even that scared,” Kathy said. She was staring off into the distance. “In fact, she said Ellie even helped calm some of the other kids down.”

“Well, that's a good sign,” he said, trying to sound upbeat.

In the kitchen, the telephone rang.

“Jesus,” he said, startled.

“I'm not in the mood,” Kathy sighed, not moving.

“I'll get it.”

“No, I'll get it,” she said, patting his thigh and getting up from the sofa. She disappeared into the kitchen and answered the phone with an exhausted, “Hello?”

David turned his attention to the TV. It was an episode of
The Big Bang Theory,
one he and Kathy had seen half a dozen times. The show's canned laughter irritated him, so he found the remote wedged between two sofa cushions and muted the volume. A scroll at the bottom of the screen read,
Officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are still puzzled over bird deaths and disappearances following unusual migratory patterns.

He thought now of the students from the college, two of whom had exhibited symptoms similar to the girl in Ellie's class. He hadn't witnessed either episode, but had learned about them both from Burt Langstrom later in the English department's office. Burt hadn't witnessed the incidents either, but he had always been a veritable font of subversive knowledge on campus, and David had no reason to doubt the stories' authenticity.

Some girl, a freshman, had doubled over in the quad between the humanities building and the cafeteria and had begun convulsing on the ground. When blood started gushing from her mouth, witnesses assumed that she had bitten her tongue while having a seizure. But then the blood had spilled out of her nose, and people started to shout for campus security.

A similar incident had occurred to a frat boy as he sat in class—he simply stiffened and tipped over, crashing to the floor. His legs began to jerk spasmodically, and when he coughed, blood sprayed along the linoleum floor tiles. Both students died at the hospital within days of their collapse. As far as David was aware, no cause of death had ever been stated.

“It's an illness,” Burt Langstrom had suggested over lunch. Just talking about it had stemmed David's appetite, but Burt tore into his roast beef sandwich as if they'd been talking about nothing more gruesome than the upcoming Orioles game. “Probably some strain of meningitis or something like that.”

“You'd think they'd notify the school if it was meningitis,” David had said. “Besides, what about the Sandoval kid? That certainly wasn't meningitis.”

Patrick Sandoval had been the third student to fall ill. He had been a junior, a basketball player, a good-looking kid who'd been in David's literary criticism class the year before. As far as David was aware, and unlike what had happened with the two previous students, there hadn't been any clear signs of a physical illness with Sandoval. There was no blood, no convulsing—only that he was spotted by a number of students wandering around campus in the middle of the night completely naked, and with a broad, sleepy smile stretched across his face. Someone even spotted Sandoval holding a conversation with thin air. Campus security showed up, approached him, and assumed he was intoxicated. They took him to the security office, where an officer administered a breathalyzer test. Yet despite his slurred speech and increasingly perplexing statements to the officers, Patrick Sandoval was stone-sober. Assuming he was under the influence of narcotics, he was taken to Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. Whether or not a toxicology test was done at the hospital, David didn't know, but the boy had returned to school the next day, apparently fine. Two days later, he found his way to the roof of his dormitory—a twenty-story tower at the east end of campus that everyone called the Fortress—where he walked right over the ledge to his death on the pavement below.

Meningitis, David knew, most likely wouldn't cause someone to do something like that. In fact, it was even possible that the thing with Sandoval was unrelated to what had happened to the two other students. Yet David couldn't forget the bewildered look in Deke's eyes that night, and how the poor guy must have, for some reason that would never be explained, set fire to his own house, where he had died in the inferno. How Sandoval had been wandering around campus naked, while Deke had been doing the same in his underwear outside in the street. Moreover, and even more disturbing to David, Patrick Sandoval had dropped right out of the sky like those geese that had rained down on the parking lot at the college the very night Deke died.

This realization was chilling.

David set his wineglass on the coffee table. His hands were trembling.

“Jesus Christ,” he heard Kathy utter from the kitchen. “No. Oh
no,
Carly!”

Carly Monroe's daughter, Phoebe, went to Arnold Elementary with Ellie. The girls had been friends since preschool. David leaned forward on the couch, feeling sweat prickle the small hairs on the nape of his neck.

“Okay, okay,” Kathy was saying in the kitchen.

David stood. He was halfway across the living room when Kathy appeared in the entranceway, the portable phone still to her ear. The look on her face was enough to cause David to freeze in midstep. He knew right then and there that the little girl from Ellie's school was dead.

“Okay,” Kathy said into the phone. Her voice wavered, unsteady. “Yes, hon. You, too. Please. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Carly. Good night.” She lowered the phone and stared at him, her eyes impossibly wide. David had never seen her look more fearful, more terrified in her life.

“It's not good,” he said.

“That was Carly Monroe. She just got a call and wanted to pass along the info. Jesus, David, she died,” Kathy said. “The poor kid died.”

“God.” David went to her, hugged her. She shuddered against him. “Did Carly say what caused it? Was the girl sick?”

“No one knows anything yet,” Kathy said, not sobbing now, but just resting against his chest. David smelled her hair, fresh with lavender shampoo, and savored the warmth of her face against the crook of his collarbone. “Mostly rumors. But she's
dead,
David. That poor kid. And Eleanor . . .”

“Ellie's fine. Let's not overreact. It's a horrible thing that's happened, but let's not lose sight of the fact that our daughter is absolutely fine.”

She pulled away from him, stared up at him. There was a hint of conspiracy behind her eyes now. “What if she's not?”

“Hon—”

“What if it's contagious?”

“No one knows
what
it is,” he told her.

“Which means,” she said, “that no one knows whether it's contagious or not.”

“We'll take Ellie to see the pediatrician, if it'll ease your mind.”

“I don't know if it will. I don't know if anyone even knows what to look for. Don't you watch the news? This is happening all over.”

“I think we just need to stay calm.”

“I'm scared to death, David.”

He nodded, then told her things would be all right. But in his head, all he could hear was Burt's final comment from that afternoon in the teachers' lounge, clanging now like a death knell:
“It's some epidemic, some new disease, David. That's my take, anyway. And the reason no one's got answers is because it's like the first appearance of the Black Plague—no one's ever seen it before.”