Feral (27 page)

He led them through the narrow tunnel, moving much slower than he usually did.
 
Now he knew their fear and felt no pleasure in proving his speed against them.
 
In a few minutes he would be home, and surprise of all surprises, for the first time in longer than he could remember he was about to entertain houseguests.

“If there's one thing I learned from the wild ones at the park,” he said, “it's that when you're hiding, the best place to go is underground.”

C
harity guessed the boy was four, maybe five years old.
 
He wore a pair of dirty, striped PJs, but his feet were bare.
 
Thick bolts of red hair stood from his head at odd angles, his pale face and green eyes were expressive of his terror.

She stood beside Toni and watched the boy run screaming through a surrealistic kaleidoscope of scenes.
 
His bedroom at one end, cluttered with dirty clothes and a few toys.
 
The bedroom faded into a school playground, gravel and squeaky schoolyard toys blowing in an unfelt breeze.
 
The playground faded slowly into what looked like a big, open-air mirror maze, like a carnival funhouse.
 
Beyond that, a vast, gray stone floor, crumbling at the edges into black nothingness, tapering toward the farthest end until nothing but a degenerating, plank-like appendage remained.
 
After that was nothing, a straight drop into oblivion.

They stood just outside the dream in the inky nothingness above and beyond, watching with a bird's-eye view as the boy fled through the playground, toward the mirror maze.
 
Behind him, lumbering from the boy's cluttered bedroom on four twisted wooden legs, was a bed.
 
Its sheets were askew; a single feather pillow lay ripped open at the headboard.

“Weird,” Toni muttered, shivering lightly.

Amid the cloud of feathers that billowed from the torn pillow, severed fingers crawled like caterpillars.
 
Eyeballs rolled and bounced from it like rubber balls; sets of biting, chattering teeth jittered around the mattress like dangerous toys; blood stained the pearly whites and smeared the bed spread behind them.
 
Where the headboard should have been stood the body of a man: torso, arms, a thick, sunburned bull's neck, and a head with wild green eyes and a shock of greasy reddish hair as thick and unruly as the boy's.

“Get back here, you dirty little bastard. It's bedtime!”
 
The voice of the bed monster was huge, even from far away it made Charity's ears ring painfully.
 
She winced, cupping her hands over them, but it didn't help.

“I'm going to catch you and put you to bed!
 
Put you to bed forever!”

In the intervals between the Bed-Monster's grotesque shouts, Charity heard the boy shriek.

Charity knew it was a dream, and not even her dream, but she was scared anyway.
 
She was scared for the redheaded boy.
 
What if the thing chasing the boy saw them floating up there?
 
Would it come for them too?
 
Could
it come for them?
 
If it did, she could not escape by waking up, because she was awake.

They watched from above while the boy lost his way in the mirror maze and had to turn back, still screaming in his high, terrified voice.
 
He found another path and ran down it.
 
From above it looked like it might be the right one.

“Please please
please
,” Charity breathed, unaware she was doing it.

The boy took another turn and went deeper into the interior of the maze; the Bed-Monster broke through the first wall of glass and waded in after him with its stiff gallop.
 
It slammed through pane after pane, closing the gap while the boy struggled with the next dead end.
 
He backtracked, took another way, and screamed even louder as the thing broke through just behind him.
 
He found another junction—right or left—picked right, and a few seconds later found his way out of the maze.
 
Behind him the bed monster crashed through and chased even faster.

“Put you to bed, boy!
 
Put you to bed!”

“Help him,” Charity pleaded.
 
“God, can't we help him?”

Toni gave her hand a gentle squeeze.
 
“We are.”

He called to the boy then, and his voice moved through the dream like a wave, blowing everything away except for the startled boy.

“
Jacob
.
 
Over here
.”

Jacob turned toward them, a look of wonder and relief spreading across his face, and Charity found herself in the center of the dream.
 
It was a new dream, Feral Park.
 
She recognized this dream; it was the one that had led her here.

It all began to fade as the boy approached, and she knew that he was awakening.

Toni's final words to Jacob, “Come to us, Jacob . . . we'll be waiting at Feral Park,” followed Charity as the dream faded and the cramped walls of the tunnel came into view around her.

Toni was still standing next to her, the fingers of his hands crossed through hers, his torch in the other hand, burning their shadows into the jagged stone.
 
He stood with his eyes shut a moment longer, as if sleeping.

“Tomorrow night,” he said, then opened his eyes and stared at the long tunnel's dead end.
 
“He's coming tomorrow night.”

L
ater, she sat quietly, moodily, slouched forward in her seat next to Jenny's empty throne.
 
She was alone there; Toni was in the group on the other side of the cavern.
 
They all knew she wanted to be alone, so they let her be.
 
She took the cell phone out again, turned it on; the display threw a green pallor over her grave face.

Gordon's cell #
.

She had tried the number a few times, but to no avail.
 
She supposed it was because she's . . . well, wherever she is.
 
Finding her way back to the main menu, the glowing words
no service
confirmed that.

Back to the phonebook again, she found her dad's preset and punched it.
 
Still nothing.

She turned it off, disgusted, frustrated, trying not to cry.
 
She saw Toni approaching and shoved the phone in her pocket, wiped the moisture from her eyes, and tried not to look as miserable as she felt.

“C'mon,” he beckoned.
 
“It's time to play.”
 
As he said this, the others were on their way out, disappearing through the tunnel to the playground.
 
A boy near the end of the line cradled the radio; a girl behind him, a large stack of CDs.

“I thought the batteries were dead,” she said.

“My man Joey went into town today and lifted some.”

“We can do that?”

“Yes,” he said, favoring her with a cocky grin.
 
“This isn't juvy, you know.”

“We can go out anytime, no restrictions?”

“Anytime,” he said.
 
“No restrictions.”
 
He stopped, seemed thoughtful for a moment.
 
“One restriction” he corrected.
 
“You have to leave your flame in the playground.
 
If you don't come back by sunrise the next day, we put it out.”

Charity glanced down at her torch, burning at the foot of her seat, and felt suddenly very vulnerable.
 
She had thought the only way it
could
go out is when you died, like Jesse's and Ginger's had.
 
It scared her to think they could extinguish it while she was away, not that she could stay away long even if she did leave.
 
She wouldn't last another night in the real world.

If the flame dies when you do, what happens to you when the flame dies
?

The answer was obvious.
 
Toni confirmed this a second after Charity thought it.

“We have to,” he said with a shrug.
 
“When you become one of us it's forever.
 
We're family now.”

Charity finished for him, “And you can't let us desert the family.”

Toni nodded.
 
“If you leave us, the Bogeys will get you again, and you might tell them about us.”

“I understand,” she said, finally rising from her seat and plucking her torch from the ground, handling it with more care than previously.
 
“You don't have to worry about me though.
 
I'm stuck here.”

“The Bogey Man,” Toni whispered, looking superstitiously about to see if they'd been overheard.
 
They were alone.
 
It was playtime.

“Yes.”

Toni told her about himself while they walked to the playground, about a father who hadn't stuck around to see him born, and about a mother who started out nice, but had started sleeping with strange men for money, which she used to buy booze and drugs.
 
She hadn't thought he knew, but he did.
 
Eventually she started to hurt him.

“It's the way they are,” he said.
 
“That's why we call them Bogeys.
 
A Bogey is a monster who hurts kids.”

“Not all of them are Bogeys,” Charity said, thinking of her dad and Shannon.
 
They had tried so hard to save her.
 
They had come back.

“Yes they are,” he said.
 
“All of them, even the ones who seem nice, will hurt you if you give them a chance.
 
We play with toys, and sometimes we break them.
 
We're kids,” he added, as if that explained it, and she supposed it did.
 
Kids broke toys, even their favorites.

“We play with toys and they play with us, and even when they try to play nice they end up hurting us, like my mom hurt me.
 
They can't help it.”

Then he told her how he started dreaming about Jenny and Feral Park.

“There were only a few when I came; Jenny, Jesse, and another boy.
 
That other boy is gone now—I don't remember him that well.
 
I'm not supposed to talk about him.
 
When they're gone they're gone, but I think I really liked him.”

“What happened to him?” Charity asked, even though she didn't want to know.
 
The whole conversation had a preplanned feel to it, like a lesson.
 
She thought maybe she was supposed to ask, because even if she didn't want to know, she
needed
to know.

“He left us.” Toni deliberately looked away from her as he said this, and she had a feeling he wanted to talk about it even less than she wanted to hear.

“And you . . .”

“Yes?”

“How?
 
How did you kill his flame?”

Toni jerked a thumb back over his shoulder, toward the abrupt wall of nothingness.

They put it in there, in the Never
, she thought, and was chilled by the idea.
 
That's worse than being killed
.
 
That's being erased
!

Then they arrived—alone on the phantom trail one second, standing inside the playground the next.
 
Toni joined the crowd at the monkey bars, at the other end of the park.
 
The music was over there, loud enough to fill the entire playground and probably the park as well.
 
There appeared to be some kind of game going on, a reckless junior version of the flying trapeze at a circus.
 
A boy hung upside down from the topmost bars of the jungle gym, swinging to one end, grabbing the hands of the first kid in a short line, then swung them to the other side.
 
He was a bigger boy, not quite as big as Toni, but close, and he was strong enough to make most of them fly.
 
When he let them go, they either caught a rung, or skidded backside through the wood chips.

Next to the jungle gym, a handful of mostly smaller kids had the carousel spinning madly, each kid behind one of the rails that ran like arched spokes from center to edge.
 
They pushed for all they were worth, grabbing on with both hands and letting the force of the spin carry them into the air, holding onto the bars for dear life, screaming in mingled terror and pleasure.

Toni slipped into the jungle gym and caught a flying kid right out of the air, like a football player making an interception, then carried the laughing kid over to the slowing carousel.
 
He set the boy down, directed them all to the center, and started it spinning even faster.