Feral (29 page)

“What if I smothered the fire?” Dave asked, rising, facing Gordon.
 
“What if I stomped it out, or pissed it out?
 
Would he come then?”

Dave made to unlatch the buckle of his belt, more show than actual threat, Gordon imagined, but the sudden heat in Shannon's voice stopped him.

“Stop!”
 
It wasn't a plea—it was an order.

Dave let go of his belt, looked at his feet, his face flushed.
 
“Sorry,” he said.
 
“My people skills are rusty.”

Then from down the hall where Gordon had fancied the man shape in the brief lightning flash, there came laughter.

They all heard him.
 
They sensed him too, in every dark corner and dancing shadow.
 
They moved closer to the light of the fire, and Dave fumbled in the woodpile for more scraps to stoke the flames.

“You can't hide forever,” the voice said.
 
“I'll get all of you.”

Then he was gone.
 
They felt his presence, rank and fever-hot, fade away.

Gone to feed
, Gordon thought. And in the absence of the Bogey Man's sick heat, Shannon shivered.

“I
was an executive accountant.
 
I made partner at thirty-one, which was no small feat in that field, or in this market.
 
I had control, focus.
 
I was good.”
 
Dave sighed, smiled, frowned, and rubbed moisture from his eyes.
 
“My professional life was full, maybe too full for a man my age, but my personal life was simple.
 
I ate dinner every night at eight o'clock, and then I jogged before I went to bed.
 
I jogged from my house to the park, watched the geese fight with the seagulls over breadcrumbs and hotdog scraps, and then I jogged home and went to bed at the same time every night.

“The park was almost always empty when I got here, just me and the birds.
 
One night there was a girl there.
 
She was alone.
 
So instead of watching the birds, I watched her play.
 
I was sure she shouldn't be there by herself but didn't know what to do about it.
 
I thought maybe she was a runaway, and it turned out I was right.”

They sat around the fire, Gordon and Shannon silent, attentive.
 
Gordon couldn't tell if the story had any significance to them or was just the disconnected ramblings of a broken man.
 
He almost felt it didn't matter.
 
He felt where it was going, and this was, after all, the perfect night for spooky stories told around campfires.

“I decided to leave her alone.
 
It wasn't any of my business.
 
I started to jog back toward home when the little girl screamed.”
 
He closed his eyes, clenched them shut.
 
The tears leaked through anyway.
 
The expression that twisted his face was of emotional pain so strong it bordered on physical.

“I saw this guy, a really big guy, bald and wearing nothing but shorts and sandals.
 
I don't know where he came from.
 
He was holding her down in the sandbox, and the things he did to her...”

Dave went silent for a moment.
 
He did not elaborate.

Then, “I was too scared to help her,” he said in a low voice.
 
“The guy was freakishly huge.
 
He reminded me of a circus strongman.
 
I couldn't run either, so I just stood up on the dike like a coward and watched.

“When he finished, I walked down to see if she was alive.
 
I knew she wasn't, but I had to be sure.
 
She was alive though.
 
She couldn't . . . she couldn't talk.
 
She just lay there, staring at me through more pain than a child should ever know, bawling like a hurt animal.”

Gordon had heard enough.
 
Shannon sat next to him, hugging her knees tight to her chest, crying.
 
Gordon wanted to reach out and strangle Dave—for the craven, complacent self-pity in his voice, for sharing yet another nightmare they could have lived without.

“Why are you telling us this?” he said, rising and purposefully striding away from Dave, checking his impulse to kill the man.
 
“What does this have to do with getting my daughter back?”

“Her name was Jenny,” Dave continued as if he had not heard Gordon.
 
“I read about her in the paper and saw her picture on the news.”

Shannon's crying grew louder; the sobs shaking her body intensified.

“Shut up!”
 
Gordon turned back to Dave, approached him with measured steps.
 
“
You're upsetting her
!”

“Jenny never left the park.
 
She never left me.
 
I've been paying for my cowardice since that night.”

“
Shut up, damnit
!
 
This has nothing to do with Charity
!”

“
Yes, it does
!” Dave screamed back with sudden violence.
 
He leapt up, his previously slow, arthritic movements transformed to the pouncing grace of a cat.
 
Before Gordon took more than one surprised step back, before he could raise a fist in defense, Dave seized him by the front of his shirt and threw him with scary ease against the wall.
 
“
Your Charity is with her now
!”

“Stop it, you two, “ Shannon stared up at them, face pinched in grief, but Gordon saw the old resolve coming back into her eyes, the strength that had saved his daughter once, and hopefully would again.

Gordon righted himself, braced for another attack, but it didn't come.

Dave faced him, almost swelling with raw animal rage. His fists clenched and unclenched, and Gordon could see the right hand wanting to reach inside the fabric of his thick shirt, where the knife was.
 
He didn't though; somehow Dave held the animal he had become at bay, and by short degrees regained his calm.

“Jenny never left,” he repeated.
 
“She stayed, and this place changed.
 
Blackstone Park became Feral Park.
 
She created her own world inside Feral Park, and she drew other kids, living kids, to it.
 
She collected the unwanted and abused kids of Riverside and created a Never
Never
Land for them here.
 
I keep an eye on them. I bring them food when I can, and music.
 
They love music.”

The image of the girl who had warned him and Charles away from the park suddenly came to Gordon, the naked, bleeding apparition, and Gordon understood that he had met the queen of Feral Park before.

The book, her book,
Where The Wild Things Are
, was still in his hotel room, if Winter and his cops hadn't taken it as evidence by now.
 
Everything in the hotel room was forfeit now—the money he had left, his clothes, everything.
 
Even his car was likely impounded by now.

All he had were the clothes on his back, the meager wad of cash in his wallet, a bankcard he dare not use now, and the cell phone clipped to his belt.
 
He remembered giving Winter his number, and wondered if the Sergeant had tried to call it.
 
He likely wouldn't be able to receive any calls down here, but he would remember to check his voice messages the next time he stepped out.

“How can I get her back?” Gordon said, his voice low now, his energy spent in anger.

“I don't know,” Dave admitted.
 
“They come out sometimes, but they never leave.
 
A part of them will always be there.”
 
He turned away from them again.
 
“Maybe you shouldn't even try,” he suggested.

“What?”

“What if you do rescue your girl from Feral Park?
 
Can you protect her from, from
him
?”

That was a question Gordon didn't know how to answer.

Shannon did.
 
Breaking her silence, she said, “We'll find a way.”

She spoke with such confidence that Gordon almost believed her.

I
nside again, underground.

Charity lay curled at the foot of her stone chair, close to her torch, though it gave no heat.
 
The cavern was neither cold nor warm.
 
There was an absence of sensation, a sensory nothing that slowly pervaded the skin and worked its way to the heart and mind.
 
She felt it working, and almost didn't care that it was changing her, making her more like
them
.

Her dad had not answered her call, maybe couldn't.
 
She wondered if he was dead, or if he had maybe, finally, given up.

Shannon too?

The others lay scattered about the cavern, next to torches propped against walls or stones.
 
Some had left the main cavern for the privacy of the tunnel and its regularly spaced cells, but most seemed to prefer the comfort of company.
 
There were snores, and the occasional senseless word spoken from varied dreams and nightmares, but mostly silence.

It wasn't until she heard the whimpering of a small girl across the cavern that she realized she wasn't the only one awake.
 
A handful of others lay in restful positions, but with eyes open wide and staring.
 
Not at her though—they stared at Jenny.
 
As she watched the growing horror on their faces she heard Jenny crying again, as she had the night before.

Charity turned slowly, knowing she shouldn't, not wanting to but helpless to stop.
 
She saw Jenny sitting in her throne, naked, mutilated, bawling like a tortured lamb.

Charity screamed, fell to the floor in an unconsciousness that wasn't sleep, but quickly blended in to sleep.

She stirred only once that night, despite the discomfort of the rough stone floor.
 
They awoke all at once to a scream heard in the dreams of every child in Riverside and the towns just beyond.
 
There was only one scream, then silence, and then the morning came, minus one child none of them knew and now never would.

S
he awoke the next morning, her vision of the horror from the night before little more than a foggy speck on her memory.
 
Her memory of calling her father from outside the playground as the storm began in the real world was just as hazy.
 
She still wondered if her father would come, but there was no emotional investment in her wondering.
 
It was a curiosity, nothing more.
 
She no longer cared if he did or not.

The morning passed as the last had before it, almost word for word, action for action, with the exception of her showdown with Ginger.
 
Ginger wasn't a problem anymore; she was dead and erased.
 
It was almost as if she had never existed.
 
In another day she might not remember the mean girl at all.
 
Like the boy who had brought her here, a blond kid about her age, now nameless and faceless.
 
His flame extinguished from their lives, his memory from the memory of the world in which they lived.
 
Hadn't he just been a dream anyway?
 
A figment of her imagination?

Charity couldn't remember.

As the morning passed, so did the day, the only difference then being her indoctrination with Jenny and Toni.
 
Other than the absence of those events, it was all the same, like being caught in the same day forever and ever.

Their night would start the same too.
 
At the appointed time, nightfall, they would file out of the cavern through the narrow stretch of dream, to the place where it had all started, and would start again, forever more.

Maybe her father and Shannon would come, maybe not.
 
Tonight Jacob would come, the boy whose nightmare Toni and she had watched like a scary movie.
 
As one of the three, Jenny's new left hand, she would go out to welcome him home.
 
It would have to be quick, though, because whatever else she had forgotten, and would forget in the days to come, she remembered The Bogey Man, and she knew he would remember her.

W
hen Shannon awoke the next morning, Dave was gone.
 
It was just her and Gordon, lying stiffly beneath one of the dirty blankets, pressed so close she could feel his heartbeat and the mellow rhythm of his breathing.
 
The fire was dead, smoldering coals and ashes.
 
The oil lamp on the table burned dimly, the wick low to conserve fuel, turned up just enough to throw a pale flickering light over their surreal setting.
 
What happened next happened without any thought, without any intention, or even concerns that Dave might be just down the corridor watching them.