One-Eyed Jack (2 page)

That afternoon I dozed off on my
break. I don’t usually do that. I dozed off, and I dreamed
again.

It wasn’t clear and detailed this
time, maybe because I was sitting at a battered Formica table in an
ugly room lit with cheap fluorescents instead of safely tucked in
my own bed, or maybe because something else was interfering
somehow. It was night in the dream, beneath a clear and starry sky,
but Jack was lying under a tree with his head in a woman’s lap. I
couldn’t tell whether this was on that same street, or nearby, or
the other side of the world, but it was definitely Jack lying
there.

I couldn’t see the woman’s face; she
was leaning forward, and her long black hair had tumbled forward
and hidden her features from me. She was wearing a white dress – or
maybe it was just a slip, not a dress at all. She was thin, thin
and bony – not model-thin, more like Auschwitz thin.

I wasn’t sure she was human. I
suspected she wasn’t. There was something ever so slightly off
about her, even in a dream.

Don’t listen to
him
, she murmured into Jack’s ear. I
didn’t hear the words exactly, there was something strange about
her and how she spoke, but I knew what she had said.
Don’t pay him any mind
,
she told him.
You’re my friend. You’re a
good boy, a smart boy, worth two of him any day, and I love you,
even if he doesn’t.
She closed her left
hand over Jack’s left, and lifted it up.

He didn’t resist; he let her lift his
hand, pull it up toward her face...

And then Fred the assistant manager
was grabbing my shoulder, saying, “Hey, Greg, break’s over. Time to
earn your pay.”

“
Right,” I said,
straightening up in my chair. My head had fallen back; I’d probably
been snoring like a goddamned Boeing. I tugged my stupid red vest
into place and got to my feet.

My body went back to work just fine,
but my mind needed a few minutes to review that tiny fragment of a
dream.

Jack was with a woman, one
older than he was, and he was friendly enough with her to put his
head in her lap and hold her hand. I got that. I didn’t know who
she was, though, or
what
she was – I’ve seen enough supernatural beings,
in my dreams or awake, to know that some of them can look almost
entirely human, and this woman had looked and sounded “off” enough
that I was pretty sure she was one of those creatures. I didn’t
know where they had been talking, or what she wanted with Jack. I
didn’t know why Jack could see and hear her when most kids his age
can’t see anything supernatural at all. I didn’t know why I was
supposed to care about any of this.

I
was
supposed to care, though. I knew
that. The dreams always mattered.

My best guess, I swear, is
that my own future self’s unconscious mind sends these dreams back
in time to me. If it was under conscious control, or if some
outside power, God or an angel or a demon, or some goddamn aliens,
or some future humans messing around with time travel, or some
mysterious cosmic force, sent them, I’d expect them to be either
more useful, or
less
useful.

They weren’t completely
random, the way they might be if it was a purely natural
phenomenon; I never got anything about Chinese peasants or
gun-runners in Mozambique, it was always someone I might have met
someday even without trying. It wasn’t just someone I was going to
meet, though; it was someone who was involved in something that
would mess up my life. He was going to be in trouble of some kind,
or was going to
cause
trouble of some kind. Usually, but not always, supernatural
trouble.

Assuming, of course, that the rules
weren’t about to change on me.

I hated that. I know it probably
sounds crazy coming from someone you’d consider a psychic, but I
didn’t like the supernatural. I never had.

My Dad never believed in the
supernatural at all; it used to drive him nuts that Mom bought into
a lot of New Age crap, crystals and vibrations and all that stuff.
I was on Dad’s side, back in the day, but then Mrs. Reinholt took
an interest in me and I started to see things, and the dreams
began, and...

Well, if it was any comfort, Mom was
mostly wrong, too. Not that I ever got a chance to tell her. It
isn’t auras and meditation and astrology; most of it is obsession
and darkness and blood and fear. It’s things living in the dark
that have no right to exist, doing things that don’t make sense.
I’d really rather not know that stuff is out there, but I can’t
pretend, not anymore, not since high school.

Dad still
can
pretend; he hasn’t
seen the things I have. That’s one reason we don’t talk much. If we
talked more, I’d eventually tell him things he doesn’t want to
hear, and he’d try to explain them away, and I’d get pissed at him
about it.

So we don’t talk.

I got through the rest of the day at
the store without breaking any merchandise or insulting any
customers, and some days that’s all I can ask.

And I knew it probably didn’t matter.
I was probably going to get fired. When I get the dreams it usually
leads to trouble that takes over my life for awhile, and the sort
of job I take generally doesn’t tolerate people who miss a week or
two of work without a decent explanation.

I keep meaning to take classes, maybe
even go for a degree from Montgomery College, so I can look for
something better, maybe something that would lead to an actual
career instead of just a small, steady paycheck, but something
always happens to interfere, so I just get one crappy wage-slave
position after another.

This one wasn’t a bad job, though, all
things considered, so at the end of my shift I stopped in the
manager’s office and told him there were some personal issues
brewing, family problems, and I might need some time off soon. I
figured it couldn’t hurt to lay the groundwork.

“
What sort of problems?”
he asked.

I stammered and coughed and told him
I’d rather not say.

He stared at me for a moment, then
said, “I can’t make any promises, Greg. Keep me posted.”

“
Yes sir, Mr.
Sanchez.”

Then I was out of there, headed for
the bus stop, eager to be home before the summer sun set. I don’t
like being out after dark. When the sun’s up, I don’t see the
various phantoms and apparitions prowling the streets of Takoma
Park; when it’s down, I see them all too well. It doesn’t exactly
do wonders for my social life, but I try hard to get home while the
sky’s still light.

I managed it that night, and was
safely in my apartment well before dark. I didn’t want to be around
people, and I didn’t feel like cooking, so dinner was a ham
sandwich, and I spent the evening channel-surfing or browsing the
web. The Nationals beat the Pirates for once, and every episode of
“Friends” ended the way I remembered it, and there wasn’t anything
on any news I could find about a twelve-year-old
runaway.

I was pretty sure what would happen
when I went to bed. Sometimes the dreams are spaced out, spread
over weeks or months, but getting the second one during a nap like
that made me think that this time there weren’t going to be any
gaps. Half of me wanted to put it off, give myself that much more
time before I got caught up in whatever this was, and the other
half wanted to get it over with so I could get on with my life, and
the result was that I packed it in about my usual time – turned the
TV off around 11:30, brushed my teeth, and dropped into bed a
little before midnight.

And sure enough, I dreamed.

I was back in Jack’s house, a silent,
invisible observer as the woman I’d seen standing at the sink
before, and who I took to be Jack’s mother, trudged upstairs,
leaving Jack’s father sprawled in front of the TV. “Sports Center”
was on; whoever these people were, they got ESPN. Not that that
narrowed anything down much; pretty much everyone with cable gets
ESPN. Half a dozen empty beer bottles – well, five empties and one
about half gone – stood on the table in front of the
sofa.

Cable TV and beer, a house in the
suburbs somewhere, a wife and kids – what was this guy griping
about? He lived better than I did.

The woman shuffled along the upstairs
hall, then stopped by a closed door and slowly, carefully, opened
it and looked in.

She froze, her head in the door. She
opened it farther, stepped into the room, looked around at a
cluttered desk, and a bookcase overflowing with books and toys and
junk, and a bureau with three drawers closed and a half-open one
with a pair of jeans sticking out, and a bed.

An empty bed. A bed that appeared to
have been hastily made up that morning, and not touched
since.

“
Jack?” she called
quietly, as she flicked on the ceiling light.

No one answered, and the light
revealed nothing she hadn’t seen in the light from the door, so she
glanced in the closet, then looked around the room again, then went
back out into the hallway and down the passage to the open door of
the dark, unoccupied bathroom.

Then she tried the other closed door,
as quietly as she could, and found the little girl asleep with her
thumb in her mouth. There was no sign of Jack.

The woman’s manner as she approached
the master bedroom made me think the idea that Jack could be in
there was a strange and unpleasant one for her, but I didn’t really
find out, because he wasn’t there, either.

She went back downstairs and stood by
the family room couch, and when “Sports Center” cut to a commercial
she said, “Jack’s not here. I looked everywhere.”

Her husband looked up blearily. “What
do you mean, he’s not here? Isn’t he in bed?”

“
No, he isn’t. His room’s
empty. He isn’t anywhere in the house.”

“
That’s... that’s
ridiculous.” He pushed himself into an upright sitting position.
“Where is he?”

“
He’s missing. He’s run
off.”

“
He wouldn’t
dare!”

“
Well, I can’t find
him!”

The man on the couch glowered at her,
then at the TV. Reluctantly, he picked up the remote and turned the
set off, then got to his feet, swaying slightly. He headed for the
stairs. “Jack?” he roared. “You up there?”

“
You’ll wake Katie!” his
wife protested.

He glared at her over his
shoulder. “That’s too damn bad.
Jack!
”

He stormed up the stairs and tore
through the rooms, flinging doors open, turning on lights, and
shouting; he paid no attention to Katie as she cowered against the
wall, her blanket pulled up to her chin.

Finally, he marched down the stairs.
“The little son of a bitch isn’t up there,” he said. “You looked in
the kitchen? And the basement?”

The woman nodded, and I think she
might have been about to say something, but then the latch on the
front door clicked, and both of them turned to stare.

The door swung open, and there was
Jack, standing in the doorway.

He looked awful – pale and unsteady.
He had the expression of someone trying not to vomit. Something
dark was smeared on the front of his shirt. His right hand was on
the door, his left was stuffed in his pocket, and something about
his pose was horribly uncomfortable.

“
Jack!” his mother
cried.

“
There
you are, you little bastard!”
his father bellowed.

He looked at them, but didn’t say
anything.

“
Get your ass in here!”
his father demanded, and Jack stepped into the house.

“
Where
have you
been
?” his mother asked.

“
I took a walk,” he said,
his voice husky.

“
At
this
hour?”

“
I... lost track of time,”
he said.

“
What’s on your shirt?”
his father asked, and his voice was lower than it had been for
several minutes.

The stain on Jack’s shirt, which had
looked dark brown out on the stoop, was dark red in the foyer
light. His mother’s hand flew to her mouth as she
gasped.

“
It looks like blood,” his
father said.

Jack looked down, and brushed at the
stain with his right hand. His left stayed in his pocket, and I
knew that wasn’t natural.

So did his father. “Let me see your
hands,” he said. “Both of them.”

Jack did not argue, did not protest;
he held out his right hand, and then pulled his left from his
pocket, wincing as he did. He held it out.

His father looked at Jack’s hands and
slumped against the foyer wall; his mother looked at them and
started screaming.

I looked at the boy’s hands, and I
woke up.

But before I woke, I saw that the
little finger on his left hand was gone, the side of his ring
finger was scraped raw, and a bit of blood-soaked rag had been
plastered over the wound as a bandage.