PART THREE
MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CLOUD GAP
1
EZ Mail Services was in a strip mall, between a Starbucks and O’Reilly Auto Parts. Crow entered just after 10 a.m., presented his Henry Rothman ID, signed for a package the size of a shoebox, and walked back out with it under his arm. In spite of the air-conditioning, the Winnebago was rank with the stench of Barry’s sickness, but they had grown used to it and hardly smelled it at all. The box bore the return address of a plumbing supply company in Flushing, New York. There actually was such a company, but it had had no hand in this particular delivery. Crow, Snake, and Jimmy Numbers watched as Nut sliced the tape with his Swiss Army Knife and lifted the flaps. He pulled out a wad of inflated plastic packing, then a double fold of cotton fluff. Beneath it, set in Styrofoam, was a large, unlabeled bottle of straw-colored fluid, eight syringes, eight darts, and a skeletal pistol.
“Holy shit, there’s enough stuff there to send her whole class to Middle Earth,” Jimmy said.
“Rose has a great deal of respect for this little chiquita,” Crow said. He took the tranquilizer gun out of its Styrofoam cradle, examined it, put it back. “We will, too.”
“Crow!” Barry’s voice was clotted and hoarse. “Come here!”
Crow left the contents of the box to Walnut and went to the man sweating on the bed. Barry was now covered with hundreds of bright red blemishes, his eyes swollen almost shut, his hair matted to his forehead. Crow could feel the fever baking off him, but the Chink was a hell of a lot stronger than Grampa Flick had been. He still wasn’t cycling.
“You guys okay?” Barry asked. “No fever? No spots?”
“We’re fine. Never mind us, you need to rest. Maybe get some sleep.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead, and I ain’t dead yet.” Barry’s red-streaked eyes gleamed. “I’m picking her up.”
Crow grabbed his hand without thinking about it, reminded himself to wash it with hot water and plenty of soap, then wondered what good that would do. They were all breathing his air, had all taken turns helping him to the jakes. Their hands had been all over him. “Do you know which one of the three girls she is? Have you got her name?”
“No.”
“Does she know we’re coming for her?”
“No. Stop asking questions and let me tell you what I do know. She’s thinking about Rose, that’s how I homed in, but she’s not thinking about her by name. ‘The woman in the hat with the one long tooth,’ that’s what she calls her. The kid’s . . .” Barry leaned to one side and coughed into a damp handkerchief. “The kid’s afraid of her.”
“She ought to be,” Crow said grimly. “Anything else?”
“Ham sandwiches. Deviled eggs.”
Crow waited.
“I’m not sure yet, but I think . . . she’s planning a picnic. Maybe with her parents. They’re going on a . . . toy train?” Barry frowned.
“What toy train? Where?”
“Don’t know. Get me closer and I will. I’m sure I will.” Barry’s hand turned in Crow’s, and suddenly bore down almost hard enough to hurt. “She might be able to help me, Daddy. If I can hold on and you can get her . . . hurt her enough to make her breathe out some steam . . . then maybe . . .”
“Maybe,” Crow said, but when he looked down he could see—just for a second—the bones inside Barry’s clutching fingers.
2
Abra was extraordinarily quiet at school that Friday. None of the faculty found this strange, although she was ordinarily vivacious and something of a chatterbox. Her father had called the school nurse that morning, and asked if she would tell Abra’s teachers to take it a bit easy on her. She wanted to go to school, but they had gotten some bad news about Abra’s great-grandmother the day before. “She’s still processing,” Dave said.
The nurse said she understood, and would pass on the message.
What Abra was actually doing that day was concentrating on being in two places at the same time. It was like simultaneously patting your head and rubbing your stomach: hard at first, but not too difficult once you got the hang of it.
Part of her had to stay with her physical body, answering the occasional question in class (a veteran hand-raiser since first grade, today she found it annoying to be called on when she was just sitting with them neatly folded on her desk), talking with her friends at lunch, and asking Coach Rennie if she could be excused from gym and go to the library instead. “I’ve got a stomachache,” she said, which was middle-school femcode for I’ve got my period.
She was equally quiet at Emma’s house after school, but that wasn’t a big problem. Emma came from a bookish family, and she was currently reading her way through the Hunger Games for the third time. Mr. Deane tried to chat Abra up when he came home from work, but quit and dove into the latest issue of The Economist when Abra answered in monosyllables and Mrs. Deane gave him a warning look.
Abra was vaguely aware of Emma putting her book aside and asking if she wanted to go out in the backyard for awhile, but most of her was with Dan: seeing through his eyes, feeling his hands and feet on the controls of The Helen Rivington’s little engine, tasting the ham sandwich he ate and the lemonade he chased it down with. When Dan spoke to her father, it was actually Abra speaking. As for Dr. John? He was riding at the very back of the train, and consequently there was no Dr. John. Just the two of them in the cab, a little father-and-daughter bonding in the wake of the bad news about Momo, cozy as could be.
Occasionally her thoughts turned to the woman in the hat, the one who had hurt the baseball boy until he died and then licked up his blood with her deformed and craving mouth. Abra couldn’t help it, but wasn’t sure it mattered. If she were being touched by Barry’s mind, her fear of Rose wouldn’t surprise him, would it?
She had an idea she couldn’t have fooled the True Knot’s locator if he had been healthy, but Barry was extremely sick. He didn’t know she knew Rose’s name. It hadn’t even occurred to him to wonder why a girl who wouldn’t be eligible for a driver’s license until 2015 was piloting the Teenytown train through the woods west of Frazier. If it had, he probably would have assumed the train didn’t really need a driver.
Because he thinks it’s a toy.
“—Scrabble?”
“Hmmm?” She looked around at Emma, at first not even sure where they were. Then she saw she was holding a basketball. Okay, the backyard. They were playing HORSE.
“I asked if you wanted to play Scrabble with me and my mom, because this is totally boring.”
“You’re winning, right?”
“Duh! All three games. Are you here at all?”
“Sorry, I’m just worried about my momo. Scrabble sounds good.” It sounded great, in fact. Emma and her mom were the slowest Scrabble players in the known universe, and would have shit large bricks if anyone had suggested playing with a timer. This would give Abra plenty of opportunity to continue minimizing her presence here. Barry was sick but he wasn’t dead, and if he got wise to the fact that Abra was performing a kind of telepathic ventriloquism, the results could be very bad. He might figure out where she really was.
Not much longer. Pretty soon they’ll all come together. God, please let it go okay.
While Emma cleared the crap off the table in the downstairs rec room and Mrs. Deane set up the board, Abra excused herself to use the toilet. She did need to go, but first she made a quick detour into the living room and peeked out the bow window. Billy’s truck was parked across the street. He saw the curtains twitch and flashed her a thumbs-up. Abra returned the gesture. Then the small part of her that was here went to the bathroom while the rest of her sat in the cab of The Helen Rivington.
We’ll eat our picnic, pick up our trash, watch the sunset, and then we’ll go back.
(eat our picnic, pick up our trash, watch the sunset, and then)
Something unpleasant and unexpected broke into her thoughts, and hard enough to snap her head back. A man and two women. The man had an eagle on his back, and both women had tramp stamps. Abra could see the tattoos because they were having naked sex beside a pool while stupid old disco music played. The women were letting out a lot of fake moans. What in hell had she stumbled across?
The shock of what those people were doing destroyed her delicate balancing act, and for a moment Abra was all in one place, all here. Cautiously, she looked again, and saw the people by the pool were all blurry. Not real. Almost ghostie people. And why? Because Barry was almost a ghostie person himself and had no interest in watching people have sex by the—
Those people aren’t by a pool, they’re on TV.
Did Barry the Chink know she was watching him watch some porno TV show? Him and the others? Abra wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think so. They had taken the possibility into account, though. Oh, yes. If she was there, they were trying to shock her into going away, or into revealing herself, or both.
“Abra?” Emma called. “We’re ready to play!”
We’re playing already, and it’s a much bigger game than Scrabble.
She had to get her balance back, and quickly. Never mind the porno TV with the crappy disco music. She was in the little train. She was driving the little train. It was her special treat. She was having fun.
We’re going to eat, we’re going to pick up our trash, we’re going to watch the sunset, and then we’re going to go back. I’m afraid of the woman in the hat but not too afraid, because I’m not home, I’m going to Cloud Gap with my dad.
“Abra! Did you fall in?”
“Coming!” she called. “Just want to wash my hands!”
I’m with my dad. I’m with my dad, and that’s all.
Looking at herself in the mirror, Abra whispered, “Hold that thought.”
3
Jimmy Numbers was behind the wheel when they pulled into the Bretton Woods rest stop, which was quite close to Anniston, the town where the troublesome girl lived. Only she wasn’t there. According to Barry, she was in a town called Frazier, a little further southeast. On a picnic with her dad. Making herself scarce. Much good it would do her.
Snake inserted the first video in the DVD player. It was called Kenny’s Poolside Adventure. “If the kid’s watching this, she’s gonna get an education,” she said, and pushed PLAY.
Nut was sitting beside Barry and feeding him more juice . . . when he could, that was. Barry had begun to cycle for real. He had little interest in juice and none at all in the poolside ménage à trois. He only looked at the screen because those were their orders. Each time he came back to his solid form, he groaned louder.
“Crow,” he said. “Get with me, Daddy.”
Crow was beside him in an instant, elbowing Walnut aside.
“Lean close,” Barry whispered, and—after one uneasy moment—Crow did as he was asked.
Barry opened his mouth, but the next cycle started before he could speak. His skin turned milky, then thinned to transparency. Crow could see his teeth locked together, the sockets that held his pain-filled eyes, and—worst of all—the shadowy crenellations of his brain. He waited, holding a hand that was no longer a hand but only a nestle of bones. Somewhere, at a great distance, that twanky disco music went on and on. Crow thought, They must be on drugs. You couldn’t fuck to music like that unless you were.
Slowly, slowly, Barry the Chink grew dense again. This time he screamed as he came back. Sweat stood out on his brow. So did the red spots, now so bright they looked like beads of blood.
He wet his lips and said, “Listen to me.”
Crow listened.
4
Dan did his best to empty his mind so Abra could fill it. He had driven the Riv out to Cloud Gap often enough for it to be almost automatic, and John was riding back by the caboose with the guns (two automatic pistols and Billy’s deer rifle). Out of sight, out of mind. Or almost. You couldn’t completely lose yourself even while you were asleep, but Abra’s presence was large enough to be a little scary. Dan thought if she stayed inside his head long enough, and kept broadcasting at her current power, he would soon be shopping for snappy sandals and matching accessories. Not to mention mooning over the groovy boys who made up the band ’Round Here.
It helped that she had insisted—at the last minute—that he take Hoppy, her old stuffed rabbit. “It will give me something to focus on,” she had said, all of them unaware that a not-quite-human gentleman whose rube name was Barry Smith would have understood perfectly. He had learned the trick from Grampa Flick, and used it many times.
It also helped that Dave Stone kept up a constant stream of family stories, many of which Abra had never heard before. And still, Dan wasn’t convinced any of this would have worked if the one in charge of finding her hadn’t been sick.
“Can’t the others do this location thing?” he had asked her.
“The lady in the hat could, even from halfway across the country, but she’s staying out of it.” That unsettling smile had once more curved Abra’s lips and exposed the tips of her teeth. It made her look far older than her years. “Rose is scared of me.”
Abra’s presence in Dan’s head wasn’t constant. Every now and then he would feel her leave as she went the other way, reaching out—oh so carefully—to the one who had been foolish enough to slip Bradley Trevor’s baseball glove on his hand. She said they had stopped in a town called Starbridge (Dan was pretty sure she meant Sturbridge) and left the turnpike there, moving along the secondary roads toward the bright blip of her consciousness. Later on they had stopped at a roadside café for lunch, not hurrying, making the final leg of the trip last. They knew where she was going now, and were perfectly willing to let her get there, because Cloud Gap was isolated. They thought she was making their job easier, and that was fine, but this was delicate work, a kind of telepathic laser surgery.
There had been one unsettling moment when a pornographic image filled Dan’s mind—some kind of group sex by a pool—but it had been gone almost at once. He supposed he had gotten a peek into her undermind, where—if you believed Dr. Freud—all sorts of primal images lurked. This was an assumption he would come to regret, although never to blame himself for; he had taught himself not to snoop into people’s most private things.
Dan held the Riv’s steering-yoke with one hand. The other was on the mangy stuffed bunny in his lap. Deep woods, now starting to flame with serious color, flowed by on both sides. In the right-hand seat—the so-called conductor’s seat—Dave rambled on, telling his daughter family stories and dancing at least one family skeleton out of the closet.
“When your mom called yesterday morning, she told me there’s a trunk stored in the basement of Momo’s building. It’s marked Alessandra. You know who that is, don’t you?”
“Gramma Sandy,” Dan said. Christ, even his voice sounded higher. Younger.
“Right you are. Now here’s something you might not know, and if that’s the case, you didn’t hear it from me. Right?”
“No, Daddy.” Dan felt his lips curve up as, some miles away, Abra smiled down at her current collection of Scrabble tiles: S P O N D L A.
“Your Gramma Sandy graduated from SUNY Albany—the State University of New York—and was doing her student teaching at a prep school, okay? Vermont, Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, I forget which. Halfway through her eight weeks, she up and quit. But she hung around for awhile, maybe picking up some part-time work, waitressing or something, for sure going to a lot of concerts and parties. She was . . .”