HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (23 page)

“
Thank you. Do
that now before you forget. Then fry some eggs and ham and give me a
tall glass of cold milk. And a big piece of apple pie,” she
added.

She let go his hand
and Ed turned immediately for the phone he kept on the back counter.
When he'd made the call, he turned to the grill and set to work to
feed the child who wore him like a cloak and moved him about like a
pretty little plaything.

Edgar, Jr. was no
relation to Ed, the cafe and station owner, but they had known one
another for two decades. Edgar, Jr. drove up in an old pickup truck
just as Angelique finished with her apple pie and was wiping her lips
with a napkin. She carefully placed a dollar bill on the counter
before sliding off the stool and making for the door.

Edgar, Jr. stopped
in his tracks between his truck and the cafe when he saw the child
emerge from inside. “Hi, kid. Where's your mama and papa?”
he asked. “They still in there with Ed?”

“
Hello, I'm
Angelique, nice to meet you,” she said, walking close and
holding up her hand for him to shake...

It took so much
energy for Angelique to work people the way she'd been doing on this
long, despicable trip across the southwest. She had done this often
with the Haitians back in Charlotte, but having to do it to Marva,
the bottle lady, then Ed, and finally, Edgar, Jr., made her feel
peeved and antagonistic. With Nick around, she did not have to force
people to do things for her by binding them with her powerful mind.
Nick was her shield against the world and provided a screen behind
which she could pretend to be a child, merely a child and of no or
little consequence.

On the road,
however, without anyone to help her, she felt she had no time to
waste telling lies and playing games with “adults.” They
simply must do what she wanted and then she set them free to return
to their mundane and unimportant little lives. She couldn't control
them for long and even for short periods it took so much out of her
that she just couldn't depend on it all the time.

Every time she let
her mind wander away from the man driving the truck, he tended to
snap out of it and suddenly clutch the wheel in a panic as if just
waking from a dream to find himself driving. Then Angelique had to
put her hand on his arm and take control again to keep them from
ending in a ditch. “Keep going,” she said, commanding him
in a soft murmur.

By the time he had
driven her into New Mexico, and the sun had set, a new moon rising
overhead, Angelique grew so weary she almost dozed off to sleep. She
felt the truck lurch, causing her to sit upright. She grabbed Edgar,
Jr.'s arm and said, “Damn it, pull over and let me out.”

The truck
straightened, slowed, and pulled onto the gravel lining the highway.
Angelique held his arm a few moments more, instructing him to turn
the truck around and go back the way he'd come, forgetting he'd ever
seen her or driven anywhere.

Outside the truck,
she arched her back and kneaded the muscles at her waist as she
watched the moon. Soon the truck was gone in the distance and the
night lowered all around. No lights showed anywhere, but the moon was
brightening over the desolate landscape.

“
I can sleep
anywhere,” Angelique said aloud, looking out at the desert, the
mountains in the distance, the scattered cacti. Sighing, she stepped
away from the two-lane highway and walked across pebbly sand looking
for a hollow, a swallow, an indentation where she might fit her small
body while the moon rode the sky and a cooling wind skipped across
the dark wasteland.

“
I was a
normal baby,” Jody said. “I just never grew up. By the
time I was five I was about the same height I am now.”

Nick listened to his
traveling companion while the bus rolled out of Utah into Nevada. In
Elko, there was a rest stop where the bus took on more passengers.
The pair of them, Nick and Jody, standing outside while eating
hotdogs from a vendor, made an unusual pair—a tall, muscled
blond man and a tiny, dark-haired man in tan trousers and a
blue-checked shirt. Other commuters steered clear, realizing the pair
was too odd, and not just the small man, but the larger one, too.
Nick's eyes were too bright, his stance too straight and stiff. He
looked like someone who should be in uniform—a policeman, a
soldier, an undertaker in a black suit.

“
What is that
something that's not right about you?” Jody asked as if
inquiring about the weather. He gobbled a big bite of hotdog and
craned his head on his neck to look up at Nick. He chewed, cheeks
full and puffed out as he squinted in the sunlight, dark hair
covering his brow. He looked like a chipmunk.

“
You read too
much into things,” Nick said.

“
I wish that
was the truth, then I could dismiss all the weird things that come
into my head. But I can't. You're not even totally human, are you?”

Nick wanted to shush
him, he wanted to bring a finger to his lips and keep the small man
from speaking too loudly where others might hear. Instead, he said,
“I'm getting more human as I go along.”

Jody nodded as if he
knew that before it was voiced. “I've never met anyone like
you, but someway I've been more scared of people who were a lot more
human.”

“
Maybe they
were too human,” Nick said cryptically. He finished the last of
his second hotdog and wiped his hands and face with a napkin. The two
of them began to move toward the bus and their seats. The driver was
in his place and soon they'd leave.

“
I was going
to get off here in Elko, look around for some kind of work,”
Jody said. “But I see you aren't staying so I guess I'm going
your way.”

It was the first
time Nick realized the little man meant to hang around him. “It
might not be safe with me.”

Jody laughed,
throwing back his head as he hopped into the window seat. “I'm
never safe. I haven't been safe a day since I was born.”

“
You're a
brave man,” Nick said. He was finding more to admire about Jody
the longer they were together.

“
And you're a
big man, or a big Not-Quite-Man, so I figure I don't have a lot to
worry about.”

Nick stared ahead,
peering out the wide front bus window, the highway ahead a gray snake
lying across a dry desert landscape. The sunlight was like melted
butter spreading itself over everything, finding all the nooks and
crannies, chasing every shadow into the light until the whole
landscape was out bare and naked for all to see. The bus windows were
open, but people were fanning themselves with cardboard church fans
and magazines to stir the hot air.

When he looked over
at Jody he saw he'd fallen asleep, his head against the half-lowered
window, the wind ruffling the hair back from his smooth forehead.

How was it, he
wondered, that he had already met two people who recognized him as
different? Was he losing his ability to hide what he really was or
were Marva and Jody put into his path for reasons he couldn't yet
comprehend? It seemed to him there were no coincidences. Each life
was set on a road leading exactly where it was supposed to go. If
that was so then he and Jody had always been meant to intersect, just
as he and Marva had been destined to meet.

He knew, though,
that something terrible had happened to Marva and it had happened
because of him, because of Angelique. He couldn't let the same thing
happen to Jody. There had to be some fairness to things and Jody
dying just because he could see into Nick and wanted to stick near
the big Not-Quite-Man wasn't fair in any measure.

I'll protect you,
little buddy, he thought, watching Jody sleep. I won't let her get
you. I won't be responsible for your death no matter how close I have
to be or how long I have to keep you safe.

Having made his vow
and feeling it was the way it had to be, Nick rested his head against
the back of the bus seat and closed his eyes for a nap.

The bus rumbled like
a mastodon, the hot, breathless wind blew through the open windows,
and the sunlight chased shadow in a game of hide and seek.

CHAPTER 26

GAMBLING IN
NEVADA

Nick and Jody
disembarked in Reno. For a minute Nick stood quietly, gathering to
him the feeling of the mountainous town that just this year, 1931,
allowed legalized gambling casinos. The small town sat in a high
desert valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. The Truckee River
rushed through it out of the mountain passes so that there were
stream-side meadows of high mountain wild flowers. The Truckee made
its way from Lake Tahoe in the north to Pyramid Lake.

Reno was not gray
and confused like Salt Lake City and it was not dry and empty of
dreams like Elko. There was a lot of life here striving toward
something the people needed, even if it was a grand illusion.

“
I like it,
too,” Jody said, standing by patiently. “It's got a
constant wind. I've always liked the wind.”

Crowds thinned as
passengers left the bus station or arrived to take a bus out. Nick
began to walk, hands in his pockets. “I've got a little money
saved,” he said. “I can get us a room and then we'll find
somewhere to eat.”

Jody grinned as he
hurried along the sidewalk to keep up. “I knew you'd let me
stay. Am I the only one who knows about you?”

Nick thought about
Mary, Marva, and Angelique. “No, there's a couple of others.”

“
But no one
like you?”

“
One other
like me, the one you have to be afraid of.”

“
Then he's not
like you.”

“
She.”

“
A woman? Who
is Not-Quite-Woman?”

“
A girl. She's
a ten year old girl—ten going on ten thousand.”

Jody whistled.
“Well, if that doesn't beat all. A little girl. No taller than
me, huh?”

Nick glanced down
and smiled. “Let's eat first,” he said. “The room
can wait.”

The streets of Reno
were straight and along them new buildings were being erected to hold
great neon signs. There was an anthill of activity. Carpenters and
brick-layers scurried amid ladies dressed in the latest fashion and
gentlemen wearing bowlers, waistcoats, and carrying canes. Even the
children looked prosperous, their clothes tidy, shoes shined, with
hair braided on the girls, and slicked down on the boys.

They found a hotel
featuring a restaurant where Nick ordered a slab of roast beef and
Jody asked for a very large bowl of a macaroni, cheese, and mystery
meat dish. For being such a small person, Jody could put away the
tack. He smeared thick pats of butter on buttermilk biscuits, drank
two glasses of milk, and finished up with a dish of peach cobbler
floating under vanilla sauce. When done he smacked his lips, sat back
and placed his hands over a small, protruding belly.

“
I have a
little money, too,” he said. “I can pay for my own
meals.”

“
As you wish.”
Nick hadn't yet finished his roast beef and mashed potatoes swimming
under brown gravy. The side dish of green peas was already empty and
most of a pot of hot tea.

“
I tend to
sleep after eating,” Jody said. “It's my metabolism or
something because I can't control it. Or maybe I'm just lazy.”

“
I'm almost
done,” Nick said, stabbing his fork into the roast beef and
stuffing it into his mouth.

“
No hurry. I
have about ten minutes yet.”

True to his word,
ten minutes later while Nick was standing in a rooming house parlor
speaking with the elderly female proprietor, Jody, who had taken to
the red velvet settee, began to snore.

The lady looked over
at him. “I can have a small trundle bed moved into your room
for him.” She inclined her head toward Jody.

“
That would be
kind. He's my brother,” Nick added. He withdrew a worn wallet
and extracted some bills.

Nick carried the
sleeping man up the stairs and put him on the single bed until a
smaller bed could be installed in the room. There was a chiffonier
painted white, a spindle-legged table and straight back chair at the
one window looking out on the street, and a chest of drawers of dark
wood holding a water pitcher and a large ceramic bowl on top for
washing up.

Nick sat at the
window calculating how long he could remain in Reno. Long enough to
get a temporary job of some sort, he expected. They would need money.
Maybe he could work on the casinos, helping to build the new ones. He
could wield a hammer and nails. He didn't know if anyone would hire
Jody for anything, but that didn't matter. He could care for him if
it came to that and he knew he would, he had to. He didn't yet know
the reason he was now teamed up with Jody, but there it was and no
denying it.