Feral (22 page)

“How did you get that scar?”
 
As soon as the question came out she regretted it.
 
She cringed as his hand stopped midway up the length of the ashen line.
 
He stiffened and turned to face her.
 
His face was unreadable, but his eyes looked hurt, embarrassed.

“I'm sorry.”
 
She found she couldn't hold that sad gaze, her eyes turned to the cup she held.
 
She sipped at it again, could feel those sad eyes still on her.

“It's okay,” he said.
 
“I guess I was calling attention to it.”

“I just want to know about you, is all,” she dared a glance toward him and found him staring out the window again.

For a while he didn't respond and she let it drop.
 
She finished her coffee but it did nothing for her weariness.
 
When she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes again he had not moved.
 
As she neared sleep again his voice broke the cold silence, startling her to awareness.

He started in a crisp, measured voice, a tone calculated to filter out any sign of emotion.
 
As he spoke the dispassionate quality of his speech faded, the mask of detachment disappeared and his words reflected the pain in his eyes.

“M
y father was born wealthy, and through his life managed to take his old money and generate a good deal of new money with it.
 
He was an investor, an investment capitol gambler.
 
He did well. You could say that I was born rich too.
 
We weren't the Rockefellers or the Duponts, but we did very well.”

Gordon couldn't believe he was telling her this, a story he had never told anyone, not even his ill-fated ex-wife.
 
He supposed he was closer to Shannon than he had been to her though.
 
Their fear, for themselves and Charity, the binding by a secret they could never share in polite society made them close.
 
Their mutual nightmare made them closer.

It was her story too.

“My mother was sick a lot.
 
She died later, it was cancer, but she was still alive then, though not with us very much.
 
She was in the hospital for a few months when it happened, my only mementos from her were the slippery satin sheets she had bought for me during her last remission.
 
For some reason she insisted I have good sheets.”
 
Gordon barked a dry, humorless laugh and shook his head.

“Father really didn't approve of me sleeping in
girl's sheets
, as he called them.
 
They bothered him more than a little.
 
I wasn't too happy about them either, partly because he hated them, but we obliged my mother.
 
When someone is dying it's hard to tell them no, even the little things take on greater meaning, and it seemed inhumane to take even that small thing from her.

“I was eight, I think, when the Bogey Man first came to me.
 
It wasn't really him, just a foreshadow of him, a projection.
 
Like the preview of a scary movie that you know will be in your town soon enough.”

While Gordon spoke, visualizing the night moment by moment, he found himself rubbing the old scar again.
 
This time he did not make himself stop.
 
He let his fingertips explore the scarred terrain of his cheek while his mind explored the scarred terrain of his childhood.
 
He hadn't let himself think of these things in a long time.
 
Now they came back with a vividness that was startling, almost as if the simple act of blinking might take him back to the very time and place.

“I would lay in bed just waiting.
 
Sometimes he would come, sometimes he wouldn't.
 
Some nights I didn't sleep at all, and when I did sleep it was only when exhaustion took me.

“One night I woke to the sound of someone opening my door, and when I saw the silhouette against the light in the hallway I screamed . . . and I pissed myself.”
 
The last he spoke quietly, as if whispering the words would make them less real.
 
He glanced nervously at Shannon and saw her eyes were closed.
 
She lay on the bed, pillows propped under her head, hugging herself.
 
Not sleeping though—her face was pursed, the expression one of dismay.
 
Tears spilled silently out of the corner of her eyes as she relived her own private hell through his memories.
 
He saw this and his shame vanished.

“Mother referred to my bedwetting as my ‘little problem,' like the night terrors.
 
My ‘little problem' made my father foaming mad; he thought my bedwetting was simple laziness, and the Bogey Man nightmares were a fiction I used to get out of trouble when I did it.”

Outside, the moisture-heavy sky finally let loose. The rain started sparingly, and within a few seconds was pouring.
 
Gordon could almost taste the electricity in the air.
 
A storm was coming, and watching it depressed him more.
 
He let the curtain fall over the window and sat on the edge of the bed, lightly so as not to disturb Shannon.

“I saw him standing there, and I pissed myself.
 
Then he stepped inside and turned the light on.
 
It was my dad.
 
He drank a lot when mother wasn't there—I could smell it on him, the usual mix of rum and pipe smoke.
 
I learned later that he had a cocaine problem, so he may have been high too, but I don't know.

“When he turned on the light and saw what I had done, he went insane.
 
He threw his bottle across my room.
 
It shattered against the wall by my headboard.
 
Then he dragged me out of bed and hit me.”
 
He tapped the scar with an index finger.
 
“I woke up on the floor the next morning and had this cut on my face from the broken bottle.
 
I don't if it happened when he knocked me down or if he did it himself.
 
I never asked.”

He felt the bed shift underneath him, turned and saw Shannon's eyes were open again.
 
She was sitting a little closer to him now, her back against the wall, her eyes red and swimming.
 
“I'm sorry,” she said.

Gordon didn't know why she had apologized: if she was sorry for what his father had done, or for having reminded him.
 
He didn't have the energy to ask.

“It never happened again. He never hurt me after that night, but he didn't talk to me much either—not until Mother died.
 
I don't know if it was because he was ashamed of what he had done, or if he was ashamed of me.
 
Probably both.

“He told Mother I did it playing at shaving with his straight razor.
 
I never told her any different.”

A long, uncomfortable silence followed—neither spoke, neither moved.

Nothing like a little pleasant conversation to break the ice
, he thought, and laughed a little.
 
“You sorry you asked now?” he said, not caring for the tone of his voice.
 
The words sounded harsh, like the bark of a cranky old man.

“No,” she said.
 
“I'm not sorry you told me either.”

He jumped a little, startled as her hands slipped around his waist.
 
She pulled herself closer to him, and as he turned to regard her, he felt the silk touch of her lips on his cheek, on the scar.
 
He turned his head toward her, shaking a little, nervousness he had not felt in a long time making his movements unsteady.
 
Tentatively, clumsily, their lips met.
 
They lingered, out of practice and unsure, then their mouths parted, and they kissed.

Across the room the phone rang.

Gordon and Shannon pulled away from each other.
 
They stared at each other, embarrassment and fear coloring their cheeks. Gordon rose and answered the phone on its third ring.

“Gordon Chambers,” he said, and paused, his face darkening.
 
“Yes, she's with me . . . no.”
 
He cupped a hand over the speaker and whispered to Shannon.
 
“Sergeant Winter.”

She was off the bed, standing next to him an instant later, leaning close to hear the conversation.

He could smell her, not the chemical sweetness of perfume or deodorant, not the acrid scent of her sweat-stained clothes.
 
A smell that was all her, that made his heart quicken and his face burn.

“We were going out,” he said, “to eat.”
 
There was another pause, and his face flushed with anger.
 
“Yes, to look too.
 
What of it?”
 
He was silent again for almost a full minute, Shannon watching him closely, trying and failing to read his expression.
 
“Sure,” he said at last.
 
“We'll be here.”
 
Then he hung up.

“What?”
 
Her voice was urgent, almost panicked.
 
“Did they find her?
 
What's going on?”

“No,” he said.
 
“There were two more disappearances.
 
Winter is on his way over to talk to us again.”

“Oh no.”
 
Her face went ghost-white.
 
She stumbled backward a few steps, striking the edge of the bed and falling to a sitting position on the roughed comforter.
 
“Were they—?” She seemed unable to finish, but she didn't need to.

“No, not kids.
 
Two cops keeping any eye on Feral Park, and in the middle of the day.”
 
Though he knew the words sounded ludicrous, he spoke them aloud anyway.
 
“It wasn't the Bogey Man.”
 
He didn't need to finish.
 
They both knew.

Feral Park had its own Bogey People.

Little ones.

C
harity thought the dead man's gun was a six-shooter; she was almost sure of it.
 
Almost sure.
 
She sat alone in a shaded niche next to the small cave at the far end of the giant den, as alone as she could be in this cavernous dome full of raggedy children.
 
A few had come and gone, carrying torches into the tunnel and disappearing.
 
She thought it was the place, or maybe led to the place, where they went when they needed to be alone.
 
It wasn't an option for her yet.
 
Until I have my own torch,
she thought,
stepping into that darkness would mean a quick end
.

It was a six-shooter
, she thought.
 
But how many times did he fire it
?
 
She counted the reports over in her memory,
three to scare the kids away, and three at the Bogey Man
.
 
Or maybe it was only two
.

Music played as ever in the background, but it had a watery quality to it.
 
She thought the batteries in their stereo might be going dead.

Five shots at least, maybe six
.

The harder she tried to remember, the foggier the memory became.

Another set of feet approached, but instead of continuing into the tunnel they stopped in front of her.
 
She looked up and saw a younger girl dressed in black denim and a leather jacket.
 
Tangled blonde hair stuck up from her head like a fright wig.

“Who do you like?” she asked.

“What?”

“Who do you want to listen to, who do you like?”

“I . . . I don't know,” Charity said.
 
She didn't know what the choices were, let alone have a preference.
 
Then she remembered Jesse, the blond boy who had died the night before.
 
Anthrax is life
, he had said with his goofy grin.
 
“Anthrax,” Charity said.

The girl smiled and ran off.
 
A few seconds later the music started again, a bass-heavy tune, slow at first, then speeding up as the drums kicked in.
 
She felt a surge of adrenaline when the guitar started—a heavy, scratchy rhythm.
 
She closed her eyes and took it in.
 
When the singing started, she couldn't make out the words very well, but she responded to them, her heart beat sped up to match the beat.
 
The heavy beat sounded like the pounding of war drums.

She was beginning to understand why they liked this music so much.
 
It was energizing.