Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (29 page)

Spencer sighed, and
took a moment to enjoy the view before stepping over Erik.  The Russian wouldn’t have been much further use to him, not since he couldn’t speak.  Besides, Spencer knew he was telling the truth about Zverev.  He’d seen it in the man’s eyes, and he was never wrong about people.

“Little girl!” he called
, taking the unlit cig Sobranie out of his mouth.  “You about ready to g—”  Something slithered past his leg.  He jerked to one side of the doorway and aimed his pistol down, but there was nothing there.  The whispers had retreated, but he had a feeling in his bones that they weren’t gone.  For a moment, there was the sound of trickling water, and as Spencer stood there puzzling over this, Kaley Dupré came down the hall, the boy peeking just around the corner.  He had on clothes that were comically too big, and Spencer snorted.  “You two ready?”

The girl, once more an apparition unless something had changed again, nodded slowly.  “We don’t have to hurry anymore.  I don’t…feel anybody else coming.”

“Yeah, well, they may not be
close
, but it won’t be long before someone else shows,” he said, walking across the ruined living room, now covered in splinters, stuffing ripped from cushions, and shards of glass.  “You can bet your little ass on that.  Zakhar didn’t answer his phone, and now these boys aren’t answering theirs.”  Just as he said that, one of the phones inside his jacket buzzed.  He took it out, looked at it:
VITALY CALLING
…

Kaley stepped over to
Spencer, looked up at him, and whispered, “We need to talk.”

“We’ll talk in the car.”

“We need to talk now.  It’s important.  Someone’s coming.”

“I thought
ya just ya couldn’t feel anybody comin’.”

“Not them.  Someone else.”  She
gave him a meaningful look, and added, “And I think you know.”

Spencer put the unlit Sobranie between his lips again. 
He did know, of course.  It wasn’t just the wind, or the tricks it played by whispering through the curtains or howling through the open doorways.  It wasn’t the mere sounds of the house creaking and settling in the wake of the wind.  No, there were other things afoot, both all around them and inside of them.  Many things were fighting to get through, hands great and small prodding at the crevices along the floorboards, testing the consistency of air and words, some were puny and nettlesome, others were dangerous and monumental.  They were either lost or trapped in another plane, had been fighting for untold eons to get through.  That, or they were merely projections of Kaley Dupré’s greatest nightmares.

Isn’t that a kind of other plane?
  The mind itself?
he reasoned, wondering if she was currently feeling around inside his head.  If she was, she understood that Spencer had a mind to kill her, for sure and for certain, if only to shut the doorway she was close to opening.  But he couldn’t.  Not only was this incorporeal version of her invulnerable to a bullet, but it would seem that the substantial version of her could evaporate when threatened.

How do you kill a phantom?

Had she read that thought in his mind?  He was usually aware when she was rooting around inside him, but there was no guarantee that she couldn’t change the game.  She had changed it a great deal so far, hadn’t she?  Spencer glared at her. 
Can you hear me?  Can you hear these thoughts?
  Kaley Dupré only continued looking up at him, with those eyes full to bursting again.

“Get the kid,” he said.  “I’ll do a quick search of the SUVs, see if
there’s anything useful in ’em.  Go to the shed, get in the Subaru, wait for me.”

The girl did as she was told, waving for the boy, who timidly followed, and Spencer
went right away to Zakhar’s bedroom closet.  Earlier, while scouring the place for serviceable lock picks, he’d seen some clothes he thought would fit him.  The burns on the lower part of his legs didn’t require immediate attention, but it still hurt when he removed his pants.  From Zakhar’s wardrobe, he selected a blue shirt, a slim insulated black jacket, some Wrangler jeans and a pair of black boots.  In the bathroom, he washed the dust and charcoal from his face and hands, then changed into his new clothes.

After this, he set about putting the finishing touches on their getaway. 
Slashed the tires of both vehicles, because one of the Russian thugs had run off earlier, when Kaley had passed through the porch and freaked them all out, and he might return.  Two less vehicles for his enemies were two less vehicles capable of searching for him.  He did take the mounted GPS computer off the dashboard of one of the vehicles, as well as a combat shotgun—
Nice one, too
, he thought, giving it an appraisal.  It was a Benelli M4 semi-automatic 12-gauge, with a nice black case, complete with thirty shells.

Spencer
lugged his new tools over to the Subaru, and tossed them into the back. He was about to get in the driver’s side when he had a thought. 
What do you think, Spence ol’ boy?  Send them another message? 
He smiled, took one of the half-full cans of “petrol,” and walked back into the house.

The fire was still going in the hearth.  Spencer doused the floor with gasoline
and made a trail to the walls, to the furniture and the bearskin rug on the floor, and then tore one of the curtains down.  One end he tossed in the fireplace, the other trailing out to the bearskin rug.

He went out to the Subaru and
got into the driver’s seat.  The boy was in the back seat, and, curiously enough, so was the apparition girl.  Spencer found this interesting because she wasn’t passing
through
the seat.  He wondered how it all worked: her powers, the space she occupied in reality, all of it.

He turned around and looked the boy over once again, and saw that he had his blue bag clutched in his hands, the same one they had found him with in the basement.  “What the hell
is
that, anyway?”  Spencer snatched it from the boy’s clutches, unzipped it, and rummaged through it.  He found a blood-glucose meter, some test strips for the meter, a few syringes and insulin pens.  “Aw,
shit
.  He’s a fucking diabetic!”  He flung the bag at the kid hatefully, hitting him in the head.

“So what?” Kaley implored.  “It doesn’t change anyth—”

“It changes a lot.  Can’t have a kid drawin’ attention.  If he bottoms out or goes into a seizure, I’ll kick his ass outta this car an’ leave him by the fuckin’ road.”

Kaley opened her mouth and closed it several times.  Finally, she said, “He won’t go into a seizure.  He has all his stuff here.”  She looked at him and smiled.  “Right, sweetie?”  The boy didn’t answer.

Spencer just snorted and cranked the car.  They finally got underway.  Once the lodge and the lake were adequately affixed in the rearview mirror, Spencer said, “Has he said anything yet?”  He spoke with the unlit Sobranie still between his lips.

Kaley looked
over at the boy, who was sitting sulkily and fearfully in his seat, staring at his feet, hardly blinking.  Then she looked at Spencer, and said, a little hesitantly, “Not yet.”

He looked at the boy through the rearview mirror.  “
Better find that voice o’ yers again, kid.  I got some questions.”  It was getting dark, so Spencer flipped on the headlights.  In the rearview mirror, he saw the first flames licking out of the lodge’s windows.  He smiled, and flipped the windshield wipers on. 
Message sent
.

The heat was welcome.  His fingers had gone numb without him really being aware.  A screen on the main console showed the temperature:
-2
3°
C
. 
That’s about, what, minus ten Fahrenheit?
  Too damn cold was what it was.

Five minutes of bobbing and sliding on the barely visible path, and finally they came to Chivelli
Ulitsa.  Two miles or so ahead, Spencer had abandoned his rental car to begin his hike. 

The road was slush and ice, but the chains were finding adequate traction.  There weren’t many cars out this way, especially now that it was dark and the storm was getting more serious, but Spencer made sure to look at the drivers of what few cars did pass, to try and discern their faces.  Any one of them might be reinforcements headed for Zakhar’s lodge.

They passed the rental car on the side of the road, a Camry.  Spencer thought about pulling over to switch vehicles, but two things stopped him.  First, he wanted to put as much distance between himself and the cabin as possible and without delay.  Second, the Forester moved a lot better in this weather, especially with its chains.

Ten minutes or so of driving in silence. 
There was no movement from anyone inside the car during that time, except when Spencer slowed down to let a deer leap across the road ahead of him.  That happened a lot out here.  He leaned forward, and, out of curiosity, he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Kaley had done the same, sliding forward smoothly before catching herself.

“S
o, how does it work?” he said, finally lighting the cigarette using the dead man’s lighter.

Kaley looked up at him.  “How does what work?”

“Well,” he said, taking a toke and feeling the sweet, sexy nicotine trickling into his lungs.  “I’ve seen you pass through things, but now you’re just sittin’ there, not passin’ through the seat or the door.”  He took another toke.  “How does it work?”

“I don’t know.  When I’m like this
…things are…kind of, like, slippery, but they have substance.  But they all have the same substance—wood floors feel the same as snow, and walls feel the same as people.  Solid and slippery.  I can pass through them if I push hard enough, though, or if I fall too fast.”

He took another toke, left the cigarette in his mouth while he drove with one hand and fiddled with the radio with his other.  “So,” he said around the cigarette, “ya do have
weight
in that form, but it really only affects you in your world.  When you passed through me, all I felt was cold, but I didn’t feel any kind o’ push.”  He found a station playing American music.  It was “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell.  He chuckled.  “Isn’t it weird when a song’s been in yer head all day, then ya turn on the radio an’ there it is, the first song playin’?”  Kaley looked at him, and appeared to be troubled by what he said.

Spencer thought he spotted movement in the woods to his right.  He looked out the passenger side window, saw a few snatches of gray and black in the fading daylight.  Here and there, he saw pairs of yellowish embers bouncing up and down in the forest, then fading.  The wolf pack.  Probably the same one that had smelled blood at Zakhar’s lodge.  Spencer had heard that there was a super pack wondering around Siberia, some people put the pack’s numbers at more than four hundred.
  Some of them had started encroaching on city streets, hunting alleys and outlying neighborhoods, the same as they would the forest.

He blew out a cloud of smoke, checked the driver of a passing van as it swished by.  An old lady, not likely a threat.  Still, he watched the van for a while until it disappeared in his rearview mirror.  “So, this world you occupy, what’s it like?”

“World?”

“You said you’re here, but you’re also back at school.  Tell me more about that.”

“I don’t know how to explain it.  I’m here, but I’m also there.”

“What are you doin’ right now over there?”

Kaley looked out the window, at another car sloshing by.  “I’m leaving my locker.  I just switched out some of my books.  I’m talking to myself, but since I’m in a crowd nobody notices.  I guess they just figure I’m either singing something to myself or I’m just weird.”

“Tell me what you see.”

The girl went silent, and for a moment Spencer thought she might not answer.  Finally, though, she said, “There’s this kid, I think his name’s Andy, he’s showing two of his friends some girl’s underwear…I think I heard him say he stole it from her gym bag, or something.  There’s a poster showing, like, a tornado funnel attacking some mustache-faced guy in a hat—the tornado is our mascot, we’re the Cartersville Purple Hurricanes.  But that’s stupid, hurricanes don’t have funnels.”

“Who’s the mustache-faced guy?”

“He’s the mascot for the Cassville Colonels.  I guess they’re, like, supposed to be our school rivals or whatever.  I haven’t been going here long.”

Spencer took another toke.  “What else can you see?”

“Others,” she said.  “Shapes and…I dunno, like, things moving in the Deep.  There’s this flowing water all around me.  It’s everywhere, even inside this car.  It’s leaking down from the roof and spilling on the floor, but it’s also climbing up the walls and pooling on the ceiling in places.  It’s murky water.  It’s like a…a…a
thin film
of something.  But it’s not so thin anymore.”

Spencer
listened intently, nodding.  He took another toke.  “What else can you see?”

“Something’s swimming in the water.  Moving like eels.  They…”  She swallowed.  “Oh…God…they killed Mrs. Cartwright…”
  Her lips started trembling.

Spencer took another toke. 
Another car swished by on the lonely road; it was a Mazda Miata, black, with a young man in the driver’s seat and a dark-haired woman in the passenger’s side.  “What else can you see?” he said, relentless.