Objects of Worship (23 page)

As he turned around, I quickly dropped to the ground
and tried, as silently as possible, to hide in the foliage.

When he reached the path, he stopped. I saw him take
out his device again. He pointed it at the woods on both
sides of the path. The
ping!
sound was especially grating
from this close. I stifled a gasp when I got a closer look
at the device. It resembled exactly those impossibly
intricate Jake Kurtz machines from
Destroyer of Worlds
,
with mazes of exposed circuitry arranged like some kind
of alien alphabet.

The man folded the device again and walked up the
rest of the path. The next few minutes dragged on, but
eventually I heard the roar of a car engine. When I reached
the main road, the black car was gone.

I took the path back down to the beach and sat in the
wet sand staring at the ocean until sunrise, bewildered
yet oddly excited. I was about to head back home when the
woman walked out of the water and onto the beach.

In the aftermath of the storm, the morning air was
unseasonably chilly. She was naked, just as she’d been when
I’d last seen her yesterday. But she seemed untroubled by
the cold.

When she saw me, panic briefly seized her features. She
made no attempt to cover herself.

I waved hello, trying to seem as unthreatening as
possible.

She hesitated, but then she walked up and sat next to me.
I silently offered her my jacket. She declined, but I insisted.
It was more for me, anyway. She nodded, but we still hadn’t
exchanged a word.

I tried small talk, but after a few awkward unfinished
sentences that provoked no reaction from her, I decided —
what the hell — to launch right into it even if it did sound
crazy.

“Okay. The way I figure it, you’re not really human.
At least not normal human. Maybe even alien. There’s
some people hunting you — maybe others like you, maybe
government — and you hid in the ocean for a whole day.
That’s either as long as you could stand or maybe you
somehow figured they’d lost the trail. I don’t know what
kind of senses or powers or whatever you have. And you’ve
done this before, hiding in the ocean. Maybe I should be
scared of you. But I’m not.”

She tentatively smiled at me. “You’re not far from the
truth.”

I waited.

She wasn’t saying anything else, so I told her how I had
seen a tall man pointing a strange device at the ocean. I
looked at her closely while I related that, and I saw her
tense up.

She let out a deep breath, turned toward me, and said, “I
was fortunate. Fossil-fuel residue can confuse the scanner,
and the water here reeks of it.”

“He tried the scanner on me. In the woods. And it didn’t
work.”

“The device is calibrated to locate me. It doesn’t register
anyone else.”

I waited again.

This time, she broke the silence. “Where am I?”

I hadn’t expected that. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean, tell me about this place. The city, the country, the
government, the date. The rest of the world. Everything.”

She nodded at the things I told her, as if checking the
facts against her memory.

More silence.

Then, “Did anything else unusual happen?”

I told her about the storm.

She nodded. “Yes, that always happens.” But she didn’t
elaborate. Another mystery. She persisted, “No other
strangers?”

I shook my head.

“That’s good. They haven’t reached this place yet.” They?
Before I could ask, she said, “Do you really want to help
me?”

Her eyes smouldered with a ferocity at odds with her
imploring tone. Her body language was so different from the
previous day, when, resigned and defeated, she had walked
into the ocean. She seemed like an entirely different person.
For a second, I became afraid of her. But then I nodded. I was
surprised at how sure I was of my answer.

I had glimpsed something else in her eyes. I couldn’t
articulate what it was — but it awakened a profound longing.

Janet was picking through the broken wall hangings.
Casually, even half-cheerfully, she asked, “Where were
you?”

We kissed hello. Her mouth was delicious. It had been
years since she’d kissed me so playfully.

“Couldn’t sleep. Went out and walked around. The dawn
light makes the destruction look especially eerie.”

I got a garbage bag from the kitchen and started sorting
through the debris. We spent the whole day cleaning up.
I couldn’t remember the last time Janet and I had such
a good time. The day whizzed by while we worked, joked
around, and reminisced. I was falling in love again.

Despite all that, my thoughts kept straying to the
strange young woman who had walked in and out of the
ocean and to the man in the black car.

After supper, Janet — exhausted from a full day’s work
around the house and hit hard by postprandial wooziness —
went upstairs to nap, and I took the opportunity to
rummage through her old clothes to find something for the
stranger. I also got her some food. I had offered to bring
her home — although I was hesitant at the idea of sharing
my knowledge of this woman’s existence with anyone,
even Janet — but the stranger insisted she could hide in
the water or in the woods until she was ready to leave. All
that mattered was that she keep safe and out of sight until
“they” got here. Her story remained vague, but she skirted
around direct questions. Like a liar. Or a crazy person.

When I returned to the beach, dusk was softening the
summer brightness.

I called out “Hello!” and the stranger emerged from the
woods that isolated the beach from the town. Her eyes
told me how furious she was, and the tone of her voice
confirmed it. “Where were you?” Janet had asked me that
same question, but the meaning was different this time.

I promised I’d come back later, probably even that very
night. “I have to go back. Our house is still a wreck . . . and
there’s so much to do around town. I do want to stay, but I
have other responsibilities.”

We almost argued, but she managed to keep her temper
from boiling.

On the way home, I considered not returning to the
beach. The stranger’s arrogance irritated me, but she
intrigued me too much and I knew I’d be back the next day.
In some way, despite the evidence of her walking, breathing,
talking body, I still thought of her as dead, and, as the only
witness to her “death,” I felt responsible for her.

When I climbed into bed, Janet stirred. She mumbled a
greeting while I kissed her nape. I settled in and spooned
her. She fell asleep again immediately. I was exhausted,
too, but I couldn’t get the stranger out of my head. It was
several hours before I finally succumbed to a sleep haunted
by nightmares — the stranger and me running, wounded,
hunted by giant monsters from Jake Kurtz’s comics.

“Soon,” she said, “they will come. Their technology allows
them to locate my point of entry, but, unlike Hunter, they
have no scanner to find me once they arrive.”

Hunter. I managed to suppress my reaction. A mixture
of fear, shock, and excitement. Kurtz’s final episode of “The
Preservers” had ended with the unfulfilled promise: “Next!
The Hunter Strikes!”

“Hunter will detect their arrival. That’s when I’ll need
you most. You must distract them. All of them. So I can . . .”
Her voice trailed off. She looked into my eyes, as if to see
how much she could trust me. It was cold that night, but
it was also beautiful. Not a cloud in the dark sky, and the
stars sharp, bright points. There was no wind, and I almost
convinced myself that the ocean smelled like it used to
when I was a teenager and we could swim in it.

For five days now, I’d been dividing my time between
fixing up the house with Janet, renewing my bonds with the
Singleton community, and keeping the stranger company
on the beach.

At my every visit the stranger repeated her story, adding
a detail or two with each retelling. “Hunter wants to kill
me, regardless of the consequences. He enjoys my suffering.
He’ll take his time, he’ll torture me — he always does. But
they . . . they want to capture me. They’re convinced I’m
dangerous. They also believe I’m more of a threat dead than
alive. They want to get to me before Hunter finds me. But I
can’t trust them; they’ve betrayed me before.”

“Why don’t you leave here, then? Flee to somewhere
none of these people can find you?”

She didn’t answer. Her attention turned inward, as if
she’d forgotten I was there.

I waited a few minutes, my mind buzzing with questions
about this bizarre and possibly insane woman, and then I
asked her another question, almost certain she wouldn’t
answer that one either. “You keep saying ‘they’ — who are
you talking about?”

“A family of adventurers. The Kings.”

I suddenly felt very dizzy. “The Preservers?”

The stranger rose and bared her teeth. “You know them!”
She struck me on the side of the head, and it sent me sprawling
on the sand.

“No, I don’t!” Her fists were clenched, and her eyes spat
her anger at me. What insanity had I let myself fall into? I
spoke quickly, hoping to quell her fury. “They’re not real!
They’re characters in comic books. A man called Jake Kurtz
invented them.”

She sat again, partially mollified but suspicion still
clouding her eyes.

I asked her, “Who are you?”

“You really don’t know, do you?” She frowned. “After . . .
afterward, once I get what I need from them, once I can
escape from all this . . . I’ll tell you everything. If you still
want to know.” She was almost crying. “For now, I’m betting
this life that they’ll get here before Hunter returns.”

The stranger was silent for a long time, her face flickering
between sadness and fury. Then she asked me about Jake
Kurtz and his connection to the Kings, so I told her about
my obsession with comics, and with his work in particular.
I stopped paying attention to her as I got excited describing
Kurtz’s early monster comics, and the Preservers, and
Destroyer
of Worlds
. I never got to speak to anyone about this stuff, not
even Janet, who only silently tolerated my comics habit.

The stranger’s fingers grasped my arm in a tight vise as I
detailed Shiva’s devious schemes in
Destroyer of Worlds
. For
the first time since I’d launched into my speech, I took a
good look at her. She was pale, shivering, frightened.

Part of me was more convinced than ever that she was
simply a crazy woman who imagined herself in the middle
of some superhero story she’d once read. But that theory
couldn’t explain the man — Hunter, if that really was his
name — with the pinging device.

Before I could say anything more, she said, “Leave me
alone. Go back to your life.”

I returned to the beach two mornings later, with fresh bread,
scrambled eggs in a plastic container, and two thermoses,
one filled with orange juice, the other with coffee. Noisily,
to make sure the stranger knew I was there, I set myself
up among the rocks where I’d first seen her walk into the
water.

I drank coffee, hoping she was still here. Wishing she’d
come out and talk to me. I was worried about her, and
I wanted to know why she’d grown so scared the other
night.

Within fifteen minutes, she joined me, emerging from
the small woods. The dress she wore — a frilly, knee-length blue thing with a revealing, low-cut neckline — I
remembered when Janet bought it, fifteen, maybe sixteen
years ago. We’d taken a day off in the middle of summer
and gone shopping at the new mall that had opened a
couple of towns over. I’d picked that dress for her from a
sale rack, and she loved it. Janet had grown a bit too plump
for it eventually, and, besides, it had a few holes and tears
now. Janet would never wear anything in such a state, even
though she knew I found scruffy clothes sexy.

The stranger accepted breakfast wordlessly. When the
eggs, bread, coffee, and juice were all gone, she said, “Thank
you for coming back. And for befriending me. I’ve not had a
friend in a long time.”

I nodded mutely, not trusting myself to have the right
words. I feared igniting her volatile temper again.

We sat together in silence, getting used to each other’s
presence.

After a while I recounted that dream in which the two of
us were hunted by Jake Kurtz’s absurd monsters.

The dream made her laugh. A new sound; a deep,
unself-conscious, guffawing laughter. For the first time, I
relaxed around her.

“Let me tell you a story,” she said.

I spent the whole day listening to her stories of
wondrous worlds — alternate realities where every fancy
could be true. Where history had taken other paths. Where
monsters roamed. Where the continents had formed in
different configurations. Where alien species walked the
Earth. Where gods and animals and humans crossbred into
exotic new permutations. Where superbeings flew through
the skies.

Worlds, she told me, that she had visited.

Janet played with her food and avoided my eyes. She was
preparing to tell me something difficult. I knew it was best
to let her get to it at her own pace.

I finished my lasagna, cleared my plate, and came back
to sit next to her.

She put her fork down and said, “I’ve noticed food
disappearing. Recent leftovers that neither of us ate. A
whole unopened box of crackers. A bag of raisins. Other
stuff, too. And you’ve gone through my clothes. One of my
old dresses is missing.”

She paused and looked at my face.

Tension knotted my back. I didn’t know what to tell her,
or even if she wanted me to respond.

“You sneak away for hours at a time. You get up in the
middle of the night and don’t come back until dawn. You
think I don’t notice, but I do.”

All I had to do was tell her about the stranger. Janet
wasn’t paranoid or jealous. If I told her the truth — that
I’d been helping a woman stranded by the storm — she’d
believe me. But that wasn’t the whole truth. Janet would
want to help, too, and I couldn’t face such an intrusion into
the insular world of the beach. I didn’t know how to explain
myself without sounding crazy, or without exposing
something that felt too private to share — even with Janet.