Wink (17 page)

His uncle stepped aside, and Marty saw why his uncle had been standing at that window. There was Sadie Marsh, pulled up to the windowsill and holding on for balance. She was looking out at Marty from the darkened window, and when she saw him, she gave a start and her mouth dropped. She slipped away from the window, pulled herself up and waved frantically.

She did not appear to notice her mother standing above her. Mrs. Marsh stood passively by her daughter, somehow slimmer than Marty remembered. Her features even from here seemed more youthful, and when he looked from his uncle to her, he realized Mrs. Marsh must have walked through that doorway. “Is she dead?” he asked.

“
Does she look dead?
”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t look alive.”

“
She done passed through, son. I believe your daddy took her. But she’s alright. Her Larry’s waiting on her, but she’s got to stay here a while with that girl of hers. She’s doing the same thing I’m doing.
”

“What’s that?”

“
I’m keeping off them Boogerbears. They don’t care much for us hanging around. I’m sort of a scarecrow, and so is Kathy Marsh. But you got an ace in your pocket, son.
” He poked Marty in the chest. “
You got something in you. I done watched you do what I never could, did it without thinking. My grandaddy said he used to whistle but that never worked for me. I tried ever’thing, but you got it figured. It’s that hooting you do. It’s that knife you carved right here in the attic with my old jackknife.
”

“You saw that?”

“
Saw it all, son. That pistol ain’t worth a pinch of salt for the battle you got to fight. Bullets don’t hurt a Boogerbear, but that hooting will knock ’em back like a spray of birdshot. Do you believe me, son
?
”

Marty thought about his sprint to the cemetery, how he had felt like he was flying. The fact that he dug a six-foot hole in a few minutes had not escaped his attention, because he knew exactly how long it took to dig a hole. He had just buried the sheriff and it was hard, grueling, day-long work. A knife could never alone dig such a hole, and nothing could dig it in a few minutes.

He had been hooting as he ran. He had been hooting as he dug. His muscles had been filled with something, and now that he had the Dead-Eye, Marty wondered if he would have seen what was giving him strength.

“I believe,” Marty said. It was a firm statement, not something muttered to improve his self-conviction. He did not need to say the words, and they sounded almost comical coming out, as if he had said he believed in grass or trees. Of course he believed.

“
Then hoot, son, and hold that knife in your hand. You put them together, and you got something special. You got something I never had.
”

Marty slid the knife out of his belt and held it up. It was huge, bigger than the pistol, more powerful, full of unlimited energy.

“
You hit your daddy with that pistol, and you’ll call up a whole heap of Boogerbears. That’s throwing blood in the water. You got to get out to them police on the freeway. Let them take care of your daddy. They’ll use their pistols, and you won’t have to worry none about the Boogerbears getting you.
”

“What about the police? Will the Boogerbears get them?”

“
Maybe. They got old Sheriff Dansley, didn’t they? Live and die by the sword, son. He’s alright, but they got him sure enough. They got me, too. That don’t mean you can’t chase them off though. Just don’t try it alone. Use your Dead-Eye. Use your hooting, and that knife.
”

Below, a shadow stalked across the yard and climbed over the fence. His father carried his shotgun, a handful of rags, and a metal can about the size and shape of a book. He walked across the Marsh’s driveway and entered the back door.

His father appeared in Sadie’s bedroom and threw the rags onto Sadie’s bed. He held the can up and squeezed a stream of liquid onto the rags. He struck his zippo lighter and lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, and then tossed the cigarette onto the soaked rags.

His father’s face turned orange. He came to the window and looked through it at Marty. Behind him flames leapt up and a dark smoke filled the bedroom. His father waggled his finger at Marty, beckoning him to come, and then pointed at the shotgun. His mouth opened in a laugh Marty could hear only in his mind.

When his father turned his back and walked into the house, more than the black widow crawled along its web between his shoulder blades. A pair of black wings unfolded and spread out behind him. He raised his arms in the air, flexing and stretching with his wings.

Sadie’s mother must have sensed something wrong downstairs, because she wisped into nothingness and left Sadie alone in the window, looking out at Marty with a perturbed and desperate stare.

Marty stutter-stepped to the window and fought an urge to jump out. Sense caught him before he leapt, and he turned and ran across the attic to the window near the rooftop. He grabbed the shutter and swung onto the roof. Once on the roof, he ran to the carport, crossed it along the safe path of nails, hopped the gap his father had made and swung off the mimosa tree onto the ground.

By the time he reached the fence, flames licked out of Sadie’s window, up the side of the house. Sadie had noticed, because a plume of deep black smoke rose in front of her window. She screamed and pounded her fists against the windowpane.

Marty’s father stood in Sadie’s driveway beside the minivan. He held the shotgun at a relaxed angle, toward the ground, as if he had been strolling the game trail waiting for a squirrel to flick its tail.

“You here to do some rescuing?” he said. “You a big damned hero? Is that what you are? You’re a killer, ain’t you. Who you gonna kill now?”

Marty raised the pistol at his father, but a pair of black wings unfolded behind him. They were fully material and Marty thought about what Uncle Cooper had said. He glanced at the freeway and saw the swarms of Boogerbears stabbing their beaks into the living and the dead. They were everywhere, like flies on a corpse.

Marty dropped the pistol, not only because it would attract the Boogerbears, but because he realized he would not be able to shoot his father in the first place. He had thought he would be able to gun down the man, but even with Sadie’s life in the balance he did not possess enough of the dark-matter resolve he would need to shoot his own father.

Marty saw Uncle Cooper in the attic window. He thought of how much it would hurt to be shot, and then his mind laughed at the thought. He had just cut out his left eye and validated a world he had seen only in his imagination. Uncle Cooper had spoken a truth that now became as self-evident and mystifying as gravity once had to Newton. He truly had nothing to fear. He had conquered pain. He had conquered fear. He had conquered his own doubts. He worried only for Sadie and with that thought he turned his eyes to her house.

The flames reached deeper into the house and an unbearable heat radiated from Sadie’s bedroom. “Hoo, hoo,” Marty said and the knife felt lighter. He switched it to his right hand and held it to his side with the blade angled downward.

His father laughed his inhuman cackle and his wings extended like a bird adrift. He seemed huge, and when he raised the shotgun to his shoulder and in one smooth motion pulled the trigger, Marty winked his Dead-Eye and unleashed an electric flash upon his father.

The shotgun recoil, coupled with the force of the wink, knocked his father onto his heels. Buckshot tore into the oak tree behind Marty, cracking limbs and ripping off leaves.

He rushed forward. He hooted. His feet lifted off the ground and the strength from earlier coursed through his blood. A glance to his side showed blue wings extended from his shoulders. The feathers were well-preened, and through the Dead-Eye glowed a brilliant fluorescent blue. A deep burst of air rose up from his chest and he hooted again, this time with a voice far stronger than he knew he had.

His father leveled the shotgun at him and shucked the pump. Another blast tore into the side of the house but Marty was already in the carport. He hardly felt the steps as he glided up them, through the back door and into Sadie’s house.

Smoke filled the kitchen. Drawers littered the floor, and the breakfast table lay in pieces with its legs broken off. The master bedroom had been destroyed, as if the house had tilted and thrown everything across the room. Cabinet doors were torn off, plates and glasses broken, and everywhere was a scene of total destruction.

Marty didn’t pause for further inspection but angled into the living area and ran toward the wall of smoke billowing out of the hallway. The roar of oxygen being consumed filled the house like a wind-tunnel, and wood moaned as it fought the heat. He closed his good eye, sealing it off from the heat and the smoke, and relied on his Dead-Eye to show him the way.

Mrs. Marsh’s body lay in a pool of blood behind her couch, while a gauzy image of her appeared in the hallway. This second form was young and thin, and even in this scene of chaos, beautiful. Her eyes were golden-green like Sadie’s, and she had poured all of that beauty into her daughter. She opened her mouth but the words were lost over the howling fire in Sadie’s bedroom.

Mrs. Marsh looked suddenly behind him and her hands went to her mouth and panic washed over her face. Marty realized he must have paused too long in the living room, and missed his opportunity to dive into the wall of black smoke.

When he turned, his father was there with the shotgun leveled at him. No humanity remained in the man. A ragged beak and black eyes consumed his face while a pair of enormous wings jutted from his back and raked against the ceiling. Dark, ape-like hair covered his arms and chest, and if Marty had not otherwise known that thing was his father, he would have believed it to be some creature breathed up from the fire behind him, spawned by the hellish nightmare on the freeway outside.

Mrs. Marsh materialized beside his father, and her hand whisked out and shoved the beak-head atop the body. The shotgun blast tore by Marty, and his eye winked and his arm came up and released the knife. He did not throw it but simply released his grip, and it flew across the room and slammed into his father’s forehead. If he had been looking only through his good eye, it would have appeared as if the knife possessed a will of its own; but through his Dead-Eye a blue owl appeared with the knife in its grip, and it dug the blade hilt-deep between his father’s eyes.

His father’s black wings fluttered against the owl’s attack, and his beak tore at it as the owl lifted him off the ground and wrenched the knife out of his skull. The body fell, shucked off like clothing and left a Boogerbear standing in its stead, wings spread, a jagged, scraggly-looking creature that slapped at the smaller, flittering owl.

The owl’s strength defied its size and its speed protected it from the flurry of attacks the Boogerbear unleashed. It shot around the Boogerbear’s larger frame and tore off a piece of the left wing, arced up and through the ceiling, and then reappeared and shucked off a piece of the Boogerbear’s other wing. It avoided a fist-grab, swiped past a stabbing beak and dug its claws into the beast’s throat and tore free a large portion of its neck. The Boogerbear’s arms went to the wound while the owl horseshoed, and with its beak dug a trench in the larger creature’s belly.

The Boogerbear stumbled forward, and the owl swept behind it and sliced one claw through the back of its neck where the spine would be, and the head toppled forward onto its chest, and the whole of it crumbled to the ground to rest on the body of Marty’s father. The owl hooted once, a long, lonesome sound, and disappeared through the ceiling.

His father was gone now along with the rest of them; and Marty thought no more on it than to acknowledge that point, because there remained only one of those he cared for, and she was trapped in the attic with nothing more than a pair of helpless legs.

He turned to the wall of smoke and dove into it. Immediately the heat shoved him back. His lungs burned and he gagged and coughed. A long stream of spit-bile dripped from his mouth, and he realized he could not draw a breath through the ragged shards that seemed to be lodged in his throat. With each inhalation his lungs kicked out the breath, and he realized he would not be able to make it through in this direction.

He turned toward the kitchen and stepped over his father’s body. He picked up his knife along the way, and clutching it, he hooted.

Immediately his lungs cleared, despite the air in the room being corrupted by so much smoke. His legs found strength and carried him out the back door, where he shimmied up the beam supporting the Marsh’s carport and found himself on the roof of their house. He ran across the carport and leapt onto their roof. Some part of him took note of how well-kept the shingles were, all of them tightly nailed and glued to the rooftop. None of them slipped out from under his feet as he ran, and with a few bounds he found himself perched alongside the attic window, looking in at Sadie. She was crying.

Marty said, “Step back, Sadie. I need to come in.”

Their attic did not have the same shutter his did, which meant he could not easily swing into the attic. He leaned off the roof, gripped the top of the siding, put one boot on the window ledge, and shifted his weight until he could put his other hand on the windowsill. He bent in half and managed to shoulder through the window without falling.

Smoke poured from Sadie’s room below. It seeped through the floorboards along with a roasting heat that to his Dead-Eye appeared blue-gray. He knew from his own attic how dry and old the house was. It would burn as fast as kindling wood.

Sadie scooted to Marty and raised one of her arms. “Marty, we can’t get out,” she said. “I can’t walk.”

Marty tucked his knife into his back pocket, put his hands under her shoulders, and dragged her across the floorboards. She was lighter than his mother but still more than he could pick up. He hooted and Sadie said, “What are you doing?”

He ignored her remark and hooted again. He felt the strength he had found digging up Uncle Cooper. It surged through him in shocks and waves. He lifted Sadie until she was eye-level with him and only her feet touched the floorboards. Through the corner of his Dead-Eye, he saw the blue wings extended and he wondered if Sadie might be able to see, or at least sense what was inside him.

Carrying her in this way, he backed himself to the window, put his rear on the windowsill, folded Sadie in half along with himself and fell backward.

As he fell, he remembered that his house and Sadie’s house were laid out the same. He had forgotten there was an air-conditioner unit directly below him and not a mound of soft grass.