Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (9 page)

“Shush now,” she said.  “I’m trying to talk—”

“—to him,” she said, pushing her sister’s hand away.

“No,” Shannon whispered, fresh tears streaming.  She had lowered her voice, and thankfully the two bitches behind them had moved on to other conversation, as well.  “No, don’t.  Don’t talk to him, don’t go near him!  You remember what happened last time!”  She squeezed Kaley’s hand.  “Don’t go near him.  He brought the Others last time.”  There was fear in her voice, but something else deeper inside of her.  Deep, deep inside Shannon, Kaley felt the underpinnings of hatred—very unlike Shannon—and all of it masked by fear.

She despises him that badly
. 
It’s beginning to change her
.  Had that been the question Mrs. Krenshaw asked that set Shannon off that day?  Had she asked about the laughing man?  Kaley had never found out, but considering how Shan was feeling right then, she wouldn’t be surprised.

Kaley looked straight ahead, both into the eyes of Spencer Pelletier and at the road signs swishing by.  The bus jumped, shifted, slowed down and sped up.  The
log cabin they were in though, was standing perfectly still, and was terribly silent.  Kaley looked to her left, at the two boys sitting across from her, and at the body of some dead guy missing a part of his head.  The boys’ book bags were in their laps.  They couldn’t be much older than Shan, and they were both whispering about something they were looking at on their iPhones. 
Not supposed to have phones at school
, she thought, almost numbly. 
Not supposed to kill anybody, either
, she figured, looking at the body lying exactly where the boys were.

It was a strange overlap, and yet each vision was distinct.  Kaley could see
both
realities perfectly.  She was somehow here and there.  Smelling the odors of the bus—dust, Miss Devereux’s perfume, a bit of methane emissions wafting in through the windows—as well as the odors of the little lodge—gun smoke still lingering, the scent of pinewood, and maybe the dead man on the ground had farted? 
I hear people do that when they die
. 
Shit themselves
.

Both terrified and detached, just as she was both on the school bus and in some cabin far away where it was snowing outside, Kaley finally accepted it and looked back at Spencer Pelletier.  The tears stopped rolling, her mind stopped reeling, and she accepted. 

“Hush now,” she told Shannon again.

“Who’re you talkin’ to?” Spencer asked.
  He’d changed some.  A bit of dark scruff was growing across his face like mold, unchecked and unchallenged, while the half-Glasgow smile that Dmitry had given him had healed wickedly, and almost no hair grew there.

She looked at him.  “My sister.”

“Your sister?”  He made a face, like he ate something sour.

“She doesn’t want me talking to you.”

“Doesn’t want you…?”  He snorted.  “How’re you even
here
?”

“I
don’t know.  I think…I think I was drawn here.”

“Yeah? 
How?  What for?” he said.  She noticed his gun was still aimed at her head. 
What does he think I’m gonna do? 
Then, she answered her own question.  Spencer had seen her at her best—or worst, depending on how you looked at it—and he knew what she was capable of.  Kaley didn’t like to think herself capable of any of that, especially when an innocent police officer had been killed amid all of that insanity, but there it was.

Kaley sensed no fear in
the psychopath, only that same alertness as before, the same willingness to drop whatever he was doing and change his plans. 
Like the way some cars go from zero to sixty
, she thought. 
Or the way some can supposedly “turn on a dime
.
”  That’s him: ready to go, ready to move on
.

Kaley swallowed.  “
The boy,” she said.

“What boy?”

“The one downstairs.  They’ve…”  She could barely bring herself to say what they’d done.  “They’ve done to him what they did to my sister.”

Spencer nodded in an
ah-what-can-you-do s
ort of way, as if he’d just heard somebody mention that the Braves had beat the Cubbies the night before; it had been a close game, and the umpire at second base had made one seriously bad call in the bottom of the ninth, but oh well, shit happens.  Perhaps these things were lamentable to some, but to Spencer none of it had any bearing on his survival, no bearing on anything in his worldview at all.  “Okay, but that must be happening to lots o’ people right now all over the world.  Why are you
here
, now, in the same place as me?”

Kaley opened her mouth, and closed it.  She didn’t have an answer.  At least, not one that she believed would satisfy the monster.

They both stood there for a few more beats, Spencer remaining mistrustful, Kaley remaining afraid, and the man on the floor remaining dead.  On the bus with her, Shannon had stopped shaking her, and now only squeezed her arm, and gave her the occasional yank, like the reminder from a persistent child that needed to go potty.  “Kaley,” she whispered.  It was whined, a drawn out “Kaaaaa-
leyyyyy
.”

“Hush now,” she said.

Spencer cocked his head to one side.  “You’re really talkin’ to your sister?” he said, his voice reverting to that Southern twang it sometimes went to.  Kaley remembered that.  She recalled how he could speak calmly and enunciate, and then whenever excited or humored, his voice would return to his native Southern.

“
Maybe,” she said, suddenly aware that it wasn’t a good idea to let Spencer Pelletier know anything more than he already knows.

“Bullshit,
maybe
.”  He was far too intuitive to trick or evade easily.  Kaley knew she would do well to remember that.  “So, you can talk to her, too, where you’re at?”  Kaley said nothing.  “Ya better talk, ya little cunt, I ain’t in no mood for games.  What the hell’s goin’ on here?”

She shook her head.  “I don’t know,” she said.  “And that’s the truth.”

Spencer sighed heavily, and finally lowered his gun.  “Fuck this.  I’m outta here.”  He stepped over to where he’d dropped the suitcase, bent down quickly to lift it, and just like that, he was ready to leave.

“Wait!  You can’t
go!”

“Yeah?” he said, opening the door.  A cold wind rushed in, and Kaley felt every bit of it. 
A frigid blast as harsh as Spencer’s attitude.  “An’ why not?”

“The boy is still downstairs.”

“So?  You’re here now.  You do something about it.”  There they were again, an obstinacy and self-preservation so reflexive it had to be in the man’s DNA.

“I can’t,” she said, taking a step towards him. 
In this state, in this “form,” the floor was so slippery, and she “skated” a bit.  Spencer watched her with some intrigue and smiled.  “I can’t help him.  I can’t unlock the doors—”

“What’re you talkin’ about?  Just go over and—”

“I’m not actually here, you moron!”

Spencer’s smile diminished, and all at once Kaley felt a wave, and an underlying tremor that rippled out from him.  Her intestines felt it, even though in this state she didn’t really have any intestines, and they felt temporarily rearranged.  Her heart skipped a beat, even though she didn’t have a heart, either.

Kaley swallowed, even though she didn’t really have a throat.  An impulse rehearsed by a life lived in a normal human body.  The tears on her face probably weren’t real, either, but she no less felt them.  “I’m not really here,” she said, more calmly now.  “I’m…it’s like a…I guess like a telepresence.”

The psychopath raised an eyebrow.  “A what?”

“Telepresence.  Like with a tele
phone
.  Just because you can hear someone on the telephone doesn’t mean they’re in the room with you.  I’ve been having these…episodes.  I Googled it—”

“You ‘Googled’
telepresence
,” he put in.

“And I think
I’m…”  She searched for a better way to say it, but couldn’t.  “I’m
phoning in
myself.  I can see and hear and feel everything in this room, but I can’t actually affect anything.”

Spencer snorted.  “
Astral projection.  Well, ain’t
that
a bitch.  See ya.”

“You can’t leave him here!”

He had just turned his back and was halfway out the door, then slowly rounded on her.  And though she suspected he couldn’t physically do anything to her in this state, instincts forced Kaley to take a step back.  “You don’t tell me what I can an’ can’t do,” he said quietly, in a voice seething with silken hate.  “You may not be in this room with me, an’ I may not be able to touch you, but I know what’ll hurt you.  Don’t think I won’t go down into that basement an’ hurt that little fucker, just because I know it’ll hurt you, in every way imaginable.”  Kaley didn’t move, didn’t blink.  “Don’t think I won’t, not for one second.”

Careful now
. 
Careful
.  The psychopath had his own games, his own notions and goals in life, and he couldn’t be bargained with in any normal fashion, nor would he bandy words with those he felt were beneath him (which was pretty much everyone), and especially not with those he thought had slighted him in any way.  That mode of thinking, and that way of life, made no sense to Kaley and she figured it was best not to try to figure it.  As easily count the stars in the heavens as fathom a warped mind such as that.

She licked her lips, in both the cabin and on the bus.  Looking out the window to her right, she saw that they were on Old Mill Road. 
Almost to the school
.  Kaley looked straight ahead, at both the stoplight ahead and at Spencer.  “The boy’s hurt.  And he’s locked downstairs.”

“Not my probl—”

“Please!  Please, just listen!  I’m
begging
you!  I know that we’re isolated out here, I can sense it.  This cabin…wherever it is, it’s in a remote place, isn’t it?  That boy, he’ll
starve
down there if you don’t—”

“
You should ask me if I give a shit first,” he suggested, turning his back on her.

“How can you be so heartless?!”

“What part of ‘psychopath’ don’t you get?  The
psycho
, or the
path
?” he called over his shoulder, stepping out into a snow so powerful Kaley could barely see through it to a line of trees far way.  “I’m a
psycho
who walks his own
path
.  Get it?”  He laughed, and staggered a bit in the snow.  Kaley half walked, half skated over to the door, and there she paused in utter frustration.  The cold was cutting, but it would not kill her.  She didn’t have blood for it chill, nor a circulatory system for it to kill.  “
Spencer!
” she hollered.  “Help me!  Help him! 
Pleeeeeease!
”  Inside the bus, the other kids around her looked at her, started laughing at her.  Miss Devereux looked at her in the rearview mirror, and just yelled “Keep it down back there” and nothing else.

The monster threw a wave over his shoulder,
then disappeared into the blizzard.

The bus lurched, slowed, made a wide turn, and just up ahead Kaley could see the large turnaround where all the parents dropped of
f their kids.  They were riding on a road parallel to that turnaround, going around to the side of the school where the buses dropped off their loads.  Their bus joined the normal procession, but it wasn’t a long wait.

The door hissed, opened, and Kaley stood there looking out the bus’s door at Cartersville Middle School, not too far away from the elementary school, where Shannon and the other small
er kids would be dropped off once all the big kids were offloaded.

“Kaley,” Shannon whispered.  “Come back.  Don’t stay with him.”

Looking out the bus door, she was also looking out the cabin’s front door, into a world blanketed by white cold, and utterly devoid of meaningful life.  How?  How could she possibly go to school now, knowing that somewhere a world away a boy was dying in a basement?  She could tell her teachers, but she was old enough to know how crazy it would sound—Detective Leon Hulsey and the others, they hadn’t believed, and neither had their mother.  Kaley had known that early on, but Shan had insisted on telling
everyone
.  Not long after that, her little sister also took the hint.

They won’t believe
. 
They can’t believe
. 
And who can blame them?

Kaley stood up.  Shan held on for dear life.  “Don’t go!  Don’t go!”

“Awww, look, Stinky’s cryin’,” said Nancy Boyle.

Kaley shot her a look, then leaned over and looked her sister dead in the eye.  “I can’t leave the boy.  I can’t leave him, not when Spencer—”

“
Don’t say his name!
”