She turned. The girl was gone. The room was empty. But that fluttering sensation continued. If anything, it had intensified. Suddenly the pain in her hand and wrist was the last thing on Rose’s mind. She wasn’t the only one who had ridden the turntable, and it didn’t matter that her eyes were still shut back in the real world, where she lay on her double bed.
The f**king brat was in another room filled with file drawers.
Her room. Her head.
Instead of the burglar, Rose had become the burgled.
(GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT)
The fluttering didn’t stop; it sped up. Rose shoved away her panic, fought for clarity and focus, found some. Just enough to set the turntable in motion again, even though it had become weirdly heavy.
(turn, world )
As it did, she felt the maddening flutter in her head first diminish and then cease as the little girl was rotated back to wherever she came from.
Except that’s not right, and this is far too serious for you to indulge in the luxury of lying to yourself. You came to her. And walked right into a trap. Why? Because in spite of all you knew, you underestimated.
Rose opened her eyes, sat up, and swung her feet onto the carpet. One of them struck the empty canister and she kicked it away. The Sidewinder t-shirt she had pulled on before lying down was damp; she reeked of sweat. It was a piggy smell, entirely unattractive. She looked unbelievingly at her hand, which was scraped and bruised and swelling. Her fingernails were going from purple to black, and she guessed she might lose at least two of them.
“But I didn’t know,” she said. “There was no way I could.” She hated the whine she heard in her voice. It was the voice of a querulous old woman. “No way at all.”
She had to get out of this goddam camper. It might be the biggest, luxiest one in the world, but right now it felt the size of a coffin. She made her way to the door, holding onto things to keep her balance. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard before she went out. Ten to two. Everything had happened in just twenty minutes. Incredible.
How much did she find out before I got free of her? How much does she know?
No way of telling for sure, but even a little could be dangerous. The brat had to be taken care of, and soon.
Rose stepped out into the pale early moonlight and took half a dozen long, steadying breaths of fresh air. She began to feel a little better, a little more herself, but she couldn’t let go of that fluttering sensation. The feeling of having someone else inside her—a rube, no less—looking at her private things. The pain had been bad, and the surprise of being trapped that way was worse, but the worst thing of all was the humiliation and sense of violation. She had been stolen from.
You are going to pay for that, princess. You just messed in with the wrong bitch.
A shape was moving toward her. Rose had settled on the top step of her RV, but now she stood up, tense, ready for anything. Then the shape got closer and she saw it was Crow. He was dressed in pajama bottoms and slippers.
“Rose, I think you better—” He stopped. “What the hell happened to your hand?”
“Never mind my f**king hand,” she snapped. “What are you doing here at two in the morning? Especially when you knew I was apt to be busy?”
“It’s Grampa Flick,” Crow said. “Apron Annie says he’s dying.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THOME 25
1
Instead of pine-scented air freshener and Alcazar cigars, Grampa Flick’s Fleetwood this morning smelled of shit, disease, and death. It was also crowded. There were at least a dozen members of the True Knot present, some gathered around the old man’s bed, many more sitting or standing in the living room, drinking coffee. The rest were outside. Everyone looked stunned and uneasy. The True wasn’t used to death among their own.
“Clear out,” Rose said. “Crow and Nut—you stay.”
“Look at him,” Petty the Chink said in a trembling voice. “Them spots! And ’e’s cycling like crazy, Rose! Oh, this is ’orrible!”
“Go on,” Rose said. She spoke gently and gave Petty a comforting squeeze on the shoulder when what she felt like doing was kicking her fat Cockney ass right out the door. She was a lazy gossip, good for nothing but warming Barry’s bed, and probably not very good at that. Rose guessed that nagging was more Petty’s specialty. When she wasn’t scared out of her mind, that is.
“Come on, folks,” Crow said. “If he is going to die, he doesn’t need to do it with an audience.”
“He’ll pull through,” Harpman Sam said. “Tougher’n a boiled owl, that’s Grampa Flick.” But he put his arm around Baba the Russian, who looked devastated, and hugged her tight against him for a moment.
They got moving, some taking a last look back over their shoulders before going down the steps to join the others. When it was just the three of them, Rose approached the bed.
Grampa Flick stared up at her without seeing her. His lips had pulled back from his gums. Great patches of his fine white hair had fallen out on the pillowcase, giving him the look of a distempered dog. His eyes were huge and wet and filled with pain. He was na**d except for a pair of boxer shorts, and his scrawny body was stippled with red marks that looked like pimples or insect bites.