CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BITCHGIRL
1
It was dark outside the Crown Motel, dawn still an hour or more away, when the door of unit 24 opened and a girl stepped out. Heavy fog had moved in, and the world was hardly there at all. The girl was wearing black pants and a white shirt. She had put her hair up in pigtails, and the face they framed looked very young. She breathed deeply, the coolness and the hanging moisture in the air doing wonders for her lingering headache but not much for her unhappy heart. Momo was dead.
Yet, if Uncle Dan was right, not really dead; just somewhere else. Perhaps a ghostie person; perhaps not. In any case, it wasn’t a thing she could spend time thinking about. Later, perhaps, she would meditate on these matters.
Dan had asked if Billy was asleep. Yes, she had told him, still fast asleep. Through the open door she could see Mr. Freeman’s feet and legs under the blankets and hear his steady snoring. He sounded like an idling motorboat.
Dan had asked if Rose or any of the others had tried to touch her mind. No. She would have known. Her traps were set. Rose would guess that. She wasn’t stupid.
He had asked if there was a telephone in her room. Yes, there was a phone. Uncle Dan told her what he wanted her to do. It was pretty simple. The scary part was what she had to say to the strange woman in Colorado. And yet she wanted to. Part of her had wanted that ever since she’d heard the baseball boy’s dying screams.
(you understand the word you have to keep saying?)
Yes, of course.
(because you have to goad her do you know what that)
(yes I know what it means)
Make her mad. Infuriate her.
Abra stood breathing into the fog. The road they’d driven in on was nothing but a scratch, the trees on the other side completely gone. So was the motel office. Sometimes she wished she was like that, all white on the inside. But only sometimes. In her deepest heart, she had never regretted what she was.
When she felt ready—as ready as she could be—Abra went back into her room and closed the door on her side so she wouldn’t disturb Mr. Freeman if she had to talk loud. She examined the instructions on the phone, pushed 9 to get an outside line, then dialed directory assistance and asked for the number of the Overlook Lodge at the Bluebell Campground, in Sidewinder, Colorado. I could give you the main number, Dan had said, but you’d only get an answering machine.
In the place where the guests ate meals and played games, the telephone rang for a long time. Dan said it probably would, and that she should just wait it out. It was, after all, two hours earlier there.
At last a grumpy voice said, “Hello? If you want the office, you called the wrong num—”
“I don’t want the office,” Abra said. She hoped the rapid heavy beating of her heart wasn’t audible in her voice. “I want Rose. Rose the Hat.”
A pause. Then: “Who is this?”
“Abra Stone. You know my name, don’t you? I’m the girl she’s looking for. Tell her I’ll call back in five minutes. If she’s there, we’ll talk. If she’s not, tell her she can go fuck herself. I won’t call back again.”
Abra hung up, then lowered her head, cupped her burning face in her palms, and took long deep breaths.
2
Rose was drinking coffee behind the wheel of her EarthCruiser, her feet on the secret compartment with the stored canisters of steam inside, when the knock came at her door. A knock this early could only mean more trouble.
“Yes,” she said. “Come in.”
It was Long Paul, wearing a robe over childish pajamas with racing cars on them. “The pay phone in the Lodge started ringing. At first I let it go, thought it was a wrong number, and besides, I was making coffee in the kitchen. But it kept on, so I answered. It was that girl. She wanted to talk to you. She said she’d call back in five minutes.”
Silent Sarey sat up in bed, blinking through her bangs, the covers clutched around her shoulders like a shawl.
“Go,” Rose told her.
Sarey did so, without a word. Rose watched through the EarthCruiser’s wide windshield as Sarey trudged barefooted back to the Bounder she had shared with Snake.
That girl.
Instead of running and hiding, the bitchgirl was making telephone calls. Talk about brassbound nerve. Her own idea? That was a little hard to believe, wasn’t it?
“What were you doing up and bustling in the kitchen so early?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
She turned toward him. Just a tall, elderly fellow with thinning hair and bifocals sitting at the end of his nose. A rube could pass him on the street every day for a year without seeing him, but he wasn’t without certain abilities. Paul didn’t have Snake’s sleeper talent, or the late Grampa Flick’s locator talent, but he was a decent persuader. If he happened to suggest that a rube slap his wife’s face—or a stranger’s, for that matter—that face would be slapped, and briskly. Everyone in the True had their little skills; it was how they got along.
“Let me see your arms, Paulie.”
He sighed and brushed the sleeves of his robe and pajamas up to his wrinkly elbows. The red spots were there.
“When did they break?”
“Saw the first couple yesterday afternoon.”
“Fever?”
“Yuh. Some.”
She gazed into his honest, trusting eyes and felt like hugging him. Some had run, but Long Paul was still here. So were most of the others. Surely enough to take care of the bitchgirl if she were really foolish enough to show her face. And she might be. What girl of thirteen wasn’t foolish?
“You’re going to be all right,” she said.
He sighed again. “Hope so. If not, it’s been a damn good run.”
“None of that talk. Everyone who sticks is going to be all right. It’s my promise, and I keep my promises. Now let’s see what our little friend from New Hampshire has to say for herself.”
3
Less than a minute after Rose settled into a chair next to the big plastic bingo drum (with her cooling mug of coffee beside it), the Lodge’s pay telephone exploded with a twentieth-century clatter that made her jump. She let it ring twice before lifting the receiver from the cradle and speaking in her most modulated voice. “Hello, dear. You could have reached out to my mind, you know. It would have saved you long-distance charges.”
A thing the bitchgirl would have been very unwise to try. Abra Stone wasn’t the only one who could lay traps.
“I’m coming for you,” the girl said. The voice was so young, so fresh! Rose thought of all the useful steam that would come with that freshness and felt greed rise in her like an unslaked thirst.
“So you’ve said. Are you sure you really want to do that, dear?”
“Will you be there if I do? Or only your trained rats?”
Rose felt a trill of anger. Not helpful, but of course she had never been much of a morning person.
“Why would I not be, dear?” She kept her voice calm and slightly indulgent—the voice of a mother (or so she imagined; she had never been one) speaking to a tantrum-prone toddler.
“Because you’re a coward.”
“I’m curious to know what you base that assumption on,” Rose said. Her tone was the same—indulgent, slightly amused—but her hand had tightened on the phone, and pressed it harder against her ear. “Never having met me.”
“Sure I have. Inside my head, and I sent you running with your tail between your legs. And you kill kids. Only cowards kill kids.”
You don’t need to justify yourself to a child, she told herself. Especially not a rube. But she heard herself saying, “You know nothing about us. What we are, or what we have to do in order to survive.”
“A tribe of cowards is what you are,” the bitchgirl said. “You think you’re so talented and so strong, but the only thing you’re really good at is eating and living long lives. You’re like hyenas. You kill the weak and then run away. Cowards.”
The contempt in her voice was like acid in Rose’s ear. “That’s not true!”
“And you’re the chief coward. You wouldn’t come after me, would you? No, not you. You sent those others instead.”
“Are we going to have a reasonable conversation, or—”
“What’s reasonable about killing kids so you can steal the stuff in their minds? What’s reasonable about that, you cowardly old whore? You sent your friends to do your work, you hid behind them, and I guess that was smart, because now they’re all dead.”
“You stupid little bitch, you don’t know anything!” Rose leaped to her feet. Her thighs bumped the table and her coffee spilled, running beneath the bingo drum. Long Paul peeked through the kitchen doorway, took one look at her face, and pulled back. “Who’s the coward? Who’s the real coward? You can say such things over the phone, but you could never say them looking into my face!”
“How many will you have to have with you when I come?” Abra taunted. “How many, you yellow bitch?”
Rose said nothing. She had to get herself under control, she knew it, but to be talked to this way by a rube girl with a mouthful of filthy schoolyard language . . . and she knew too much. Much too much.
“Would you even dare to face me alone?” the bitchgirl asked.
“Try me,” Rose spat.
There was a pause on the other end, and when the bitchgirl next spoke, she sounded thoughtful. “One-on-one? No, you wouldn’t dare. A coward like you would never dare. Not even against a kid. You’re a cheater and a liar. You look pretty sometimes, but I’ve seen your real face. You’re nothing but an old chickenshit whore.”
“You . . . you . . .” But she could say no more. Her rage was so great it felt like it was strangling her. Some of it was shock at finding herself—Rose the Hat—dressed down by a kid whose idea of transportation was a bicycle and whose major concern before these last weeks had probably been when she might get breasts bigger than mosquito bumps.
“But maybe I’ll give you a chance,” the bitchgirl said. Her confidence and breezy temerity were unbelievable. “Of course, if you take me up on it, I’ll wipe the floor with you. I won’t bother with the others, they’re dying already.” She actually laughed. “Choking on the baseball boy, and good for him.”
“If you come, I’ll kill you,” Rose said. One hand found her throat, closed on it, and began to squeeze rhythmically. Later there would be bruises. “If you run, I’ll find you. And when I do, you’ll scream for hours before you die.”
“I won’t run,” the girl said. “And we’ll see who does the screaming.”
“How many will you have to back you up? Dear?”
“I’ll be alone.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Read my mind,” the girl said. “Or are you afraid to do that, too?”
Rose said nothing.
“Sure you are. You remember what happened last time you tried it. I gave you a taste of your own medicine, and you didn’t like it, did you? Hyena. Child-killer. Coward.”
“Stop . . . calling . . . me that.”
“There’s a place up the hill from where you are. A lookout. It’s called Roof O’ the World. I found it on the internet. Be there at five o’clock Monday afternoon. Be there alone. If you’re not, if the rest of your pack of hyenas doesn’t stay in that meeting-hall place while we do our business, I’ll know. And I’ll go away.”
“I’d find you,” Rose repeated.
“You think?” Actually jeering at her.
Rose shut her eyes and saw the girl. She saw her writhing on the ground, her mouth stuffed with stinging hornets and hot sticks jutting out of her eyes. No one talks to me like this. Not ever.
“I suppose you might find me. But by the time you did, how many of your stinking True Knot would be left to back you up? A dozen? Ten? Maybe only three or four?”
This idea had already occurred to Rose. For a child she’d never even seen face-to-face to reach the same conclusion was, in many ways, the most infuriating thing of all.
“The Crow knew Shakespeare,” the bitchgirl said. “He quoted some to me not too long before I killed him. I know a little, too, because we had a Shakespeare unit in school. We only read one play, Romeo and Juliet, but Ms. Franklin gave us a printout with a whole list of famous lines from his other plays. Things like ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘It was Greek to me.’ Did you know those were from Shakespeare? I didn’t. Don’t you think it’s interesting?”
Rose said nothing.
“You’re not thinking about Shakespeare at all,” the bitchgirl said. “You’re thinking about how much you’d like to kill me. I don’t have to read your mind to know that.”
“If I were you, I’d run,” Rose said thoughtfully. “As fast and as far as your baby legs can carry you. It wouldn’t do you any good, but you’d live a little longer.”
The bitchgirl was not to be turned. “There was another saying. I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something like ‘Hoisted on your own petard.’ Ms. Franklin said a petard was a bomb on a stick. I think that’s sort of what’s happening to your tribe of cowards. You sucked the wrong kind of steam, and got stuck on a petard, and now the bomb is going off.” She paused. “Are you still there, Rose? Or did you run away?”
“Come to me, dear,” Rose said. She had regained her calm. “If you want to meet me on the lookout, that’s where I’ll be. We’ll take in the view together, shall we? And see who’s the stronger.”
She hung up before the bitchgirl could say anything else. She’d lost the temper she had vowed to keep, but she had at least gotten the last word.
Or maybe not, because the one the bitchgirl kept using played over and over in her head, like a gramophone record stuck in a bad groove.
Coward. Coward. Coward.