Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (85 page)

My subconscious had picked up on it. My thoughts had only been on lunch and claims and drinking and my failed marriage and Amanda. I hardly had room in there for paranoia.

So who the hell would want to watch me? I didn’t know. Of course, I could be wrong, too. Maybe no one was watching me. Maybe I was losing my mind. These past few months had been stressful, to say the least. Try divorcing my wife and you’d know what I mean. Hell, try being married to her.

Still pausing, even as my precious lunch ticked away, I scanned the busy street corner. Even the homeless people were on the move. No one seemed to be noticing me; no one seemed to care.

Then why had I felt like I had suddenly been thrown on stage with hundreds of eyes on me, like a Lindsay Lohan rehab photo shoot during sweeps week?

No, not hundreds of eyes. Just one big, blinding spotlight, and I was inexplicably sure, just one person was watching me.

What the hell was going on?

I surveyed the street, wondering if I should cross. Cars in gridlock. People chatting importantly behind smoky restaurant windows. Busy people looking busy. Busy people looking important. Unimportant people looking better than me. Shades. Tans. Nice clothing.

I started forward again, frowning, wondering what the hell was going on. I hadn’t touched any booze today, although that would change the instant I got home. It was truly just a matter of how fast I could change out of my work clothes, throw on some sweats, and uncap the booze. If I didn’t break down at lunch and have a few, which was sounding like a better idea by the second.

I shivered again. The sun was high and hot. The air was still. Exhaust from cars was thick and cloying. No reason to feel a chill.

Maybe I was getting sick. Or maybe a goose walked over my grave. Hell, a whole flock. Maybe a dozen flocks, taking a crap on my final resting place and flying North for the summer. I wondered idly if I had any vitamin C at home, and decided to stock up on some after work.

No. No stocking up. That would mean delaying my drinking. I needed to drink. I had to drink. If I didn’t have vitamins, then tough shit. Besides, booze has alcohol, and alcohol was known for killing germs.

Well, I couldn’t stand there any longer. I was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, although the sleeves were rolled up to my elbows, and now the chill was giving way to sweat. I darted around the slower pedestrians, begging their pardons as I went. I had wasted precious minutes standing there on the street corner, playing silly mind games and denying I had a problem. And lunch was serious business.

With only thirty minutes, I had to coordinate my time wisely. Today I had chosen Chinese food, because it was fast in and fast out, in more ways than one. And I knew that once I made a decision I had to stick with it, because there was no turning back. Not with thirty minutes. Certainly no time to stand around cracking up or breaking down.

Focus, Al. You can do it.

I checked my watch: twenty-four minutes to go. I cut around a slow-moving rag man pushing a shopping cart and mumbling incoherently to himself. Fullerton is a typical southern California suburb, boasting old brick buildings mingled with newer ones made of glass and steel. Downtown had everything—antique shops, banks, restaurants, and even a local community college. I strode down the busy street, atypical for most Orange County streets because of the foot traffic. Downtown changed all that. There were enough businesses and restaurants within walking distance of each other to remove the need for driving. Or at least the need to drive to lunch.

I worked steadily, determinedly to the Great Wall of China Chinese food restaurant on the corner of Chapman and Harbor. As I passed a
tai-kwan-do
studio, the little restaurant came into view.

Almost there. Just across the street—

Damn, missed the light. I checked my watch. Twenty-three minutes and counting. At the corner, with Mercedes and Hondas and a city bus whizzing by, I waited among a small group of mostly college students. It made sense. The college was down the road to the right. Almost all of them immediately whipped out their cell phones the moment the light had turned red, some thumbing out numbers and texts and others playing games.

I stood with them, easily a head taller than most. I didn’t feel a need to whip out my cell phone. I didn’t need the chronic wistful glance confirming Amanda had not texted, just as she had not texted in all the months before. I felt only a need to dash through traffic and put my lunch order in—

The hair at the back of my neck prickled again, and I shivered. I absently rubbed my arms, and as I did, I spotted her across the street.

An old lady. Her back bowed like a harp. Angry gray hair hung like dead weeds from under a wool cap. She looked like a witch, complete with a hooked nose and a missing front tooth. A bent coat-hanger of ugliness in a Goth-trash fashion show.

And she was staring. Openly staring at me.

Was she the source of the goose bumps and chills? I didn’t know, but there was something else about her.

Do I know her from somewhere?

Maybe I was hallucinating. I had started doing that a few months ago. It was freaky as hell, and I was certain it had something to do with my drinking. Either that, or those ghostly blobs and shapes I saw during my late-night binges really did exist just on the periphery of my vision.

Or maybe you’re going crazy. The simplest explanation is usually the right one.

As I debated my sanity, standing there on the street corner, the real world got crazier than my head could ever have dreamed.

She stepped out into traffic.

Cars screeched to a stop. Horns honked. A truck swerved hard and went up on the curb and into some bushes. Had those bushes been people, they would have been injured or killed.

She doddered shakily across the street. She used a cane and she didn’t seem to give a damn about the cars piling up around her. I didn’t hear any actual collisions—I’m always alert for accidents, thanks to my job—and the further she got across the busy boulevard, the more clearly the coming cars saw her, and they were able to brake without hitting anything, her included.

She was headed, I was certain, for me.

My heart was hammering hard in my chest like a convict in a tin box, and I had broken out in a cold sweat. My throat was tight and my breathing was restricted. I swallowed with difficulty and opened my mouth to suck in some air.

Christ, I should really quit drinking.

But I couldn’t deny she was real, or that she was heading straight for me.

Horns honked. Someone shouted out a driver’s-side window. Most drivers seemed to resign themselves to a crazy old lady in their midst. A few seconds of delay and distraction, and maybe entertainment if they were lucky, and she’d be across the road and they could all get on with their life-and-death business.

And now she was across the street, and she stood in the littered gutter in front of me—

Who is she? Somebody my ex knows? That would make sense. They’re obviously both crazy, and like attracts like.

Of course, at one time,
I
had been highly attracted to my ex, as well.

I held my breath, rooted to the street corner. In front of me, the crosswalk light signal had turned green. The students were pouring across the street. I should be pouring with them, heading to the Great Wall of China.

But I didn’t move. Instead, I found myself staring down at the old lady as she approached me.

I definitely know her.

I didn’t know whether to run or help her up onto the curb. She didn’t give me time to decide.

She gripped my hand. And when she did, it all came back to me....

Jimmy and the mouse.

My eyes shot open.

Disoriented, I had no idea where I was, the world a glistening canyon of glass, steel, and reflected clouds. Then I heard the rumble of traffic, felt the sun hot on my face, and smelled something old and slightly foul, like a wino under a park bench or yesterday’s
moo goo gai pan
.

It’s lunchtime; I’m on Harbor Boulevard.

The old lady
...

She was still there, still real, still holding my hand. I snatched it away and stumbled backward. Had I not quickly regained my balance, I would have stumbled all the way out into traffic. I steadied myself, fighting a strong sense of vertigo.

What the hell happened? Did I black out?

I remembered her reaching out to me, taking my hand, and then...nothing. No, not nothing. I had relived a memory. A very disturbing memory, one that I had done my best to keep locked away in the deepest vaults of my mind. But those vaults had somehow been opened....

The instant she had taken my hand.

The old lady stepped forward, directly in front of me. Despite myself, and despite the manic taxis and runaway mopeds zipping behind me, I took a small step back. I was disoriented. I felt...invaded somehow, as if something or someone had accessed my mind, and it was a disturbing sensation, to say the least.

We’ve all seen the movies where the demon comes into somebody’s head and makes that somebody do weird stuff. But I know movies from real life, and believe me, my life at times could have made a good horror movie. But I’d never felt possessed like that, where the closets of my brain were thrown open and the stuff stored in there had been dumped into the daylight.

Because
that
memory had been buried deep.

My best friend Jimmy, bitten by a mouse when we were kids rummaging in his dad’s garage for girlie magazines. The bite had been nothing serious, but enough to draw blood. In a week he was dead from rabies. From a damn
mouse bite
.

That mouse, nearly as big as a rat, black with a white streak down its back, had come to me in many a nightmare, but rarely did it creep into my waking life.

And this old lady had brought it out.

A wave of dizziness hit me and I grabbed the signal pole at the corner. I did my best to keep myself on my feet, hoping my fellow pedestrians wouldn’t notice. All I needed was for word to get around that I was wobbly on the concrete. That plus the chronic stench of booze would lose me my job. Which would evaporate my drinking money. And then where would I be?

I got it together, told myself one last time that possession and mind-reading and senior-citizen stalkers were only in the movies, even in southern California, and I scooted sideways, parallel to the curb, and then eased down the sidewalk.

The old lady followed.

Sweat was pouring from my brow, but that inexplicable chill lay beneath it like an iceberg in the tropics. Gone were my thoughts of fitting my lunch in. Hell, gone were all thoughts of eating altogether.

I’d be lucky if I didn’t dry heave.

Safely away from the street, I looked again at the old lady, still unsure if she was real or something that had been hidden away in that dream closet with Jimmy’s mouse. She was small. Barely five foot, if that. She had dark brown eyes, almost black. The skin around her face was so heavily wrinkled I had trouble finding the slit of her mouth. I couldn’t tell if she was smiling or frowning. She looked ancient and displaced, as if she belonged in another country; hell, another
time
. She wore black clothing and a black, old-fashioned cap with a bit of dark lace or veil. Her dark shoes were scuffed, and her wardrobe was rumpled, drab, and out-of-fashion.

They were like something you’d have buried your weird aunt in, the aunt nobody really liked that much, whose passing left everyone sort of relieved she’d moved on to another plane.

“Who are you?” I asked, surprised that my voice sounded anything like my own. I half expected some sort of rodent’s squeak, or maybe a demonic groaning, as if I were a ventriloquist’s dummy of the damned.

She didn’t answer, and the river of the crowd flowed on around us. We were just two people of millions. Except one of us was crazy and the other was, well, me.

“What happened?” I asked her, more forcefully.

“The black mouse,” said the old lady, grinning. At least, I
think
she grinned. The fault lines near her mouth seemed to curve up. “The mouse with the white stripe.”

She knows about the mouse?

Was it she who had broken into the lock box of my mind, like a thief in the night? What the hell was happening? My God, I was just going to lunch, like any other day, thinking about
not
thinking about a drink....

“Do I know you?” I asked finally. I didn’t know what else to ask or say. She still looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. I was sure I had seen her somewhere before. Maybe here on the streets. Maybe she was part of the local homeless brigade.

“It does not matter, Albert Shipway. Because I know
you
.” Her voice was steady, with a very strong accent, vaguely European.

Pedestrians continued by, lucky people with lunches in their bellies. The sun continued to shine down on my face. I was here. This was really happening. I could feel my heart beating. Feel the warm wind on my cheeks. I wasn’t dreaming. Was I?