“Like I said before. I recognized you from the dream. That’s the truth.”
At last an edge, just a thin one, came into her deadpan voice. “I don’t like you, snoop. I’d love to smash your monkey face. Don’t tempt me. Don’t you ever follow me again.”
“I won’t. Why would I? You’re not that interesting.”
“I can turn interesting from one second to the next, snoop, more interesting than you ever want to know. You stay away from the sixth floor.”
“I don’t need to go up there.”
“You don’t want to, either, unless you’re even dumber than I think. And you don’t want to be talking about me to anyone, not to anyone. You never saw me. We didn’t have this little chat. You get my point, snoop?”
“Yeah. All right. Okay. Whatever. Jeez.”
She stared at me for a long moment and then looked at the La Florentine box on the nightstand. “What’d you just put in there?”
“Nothing. Stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“My stuff.”
“Was it something you took from my satchel or my bedroll?”
“I didn’t touch your things. I just looked.”
“So you say, liar. Open it.”
I picked up the metal box but held it against my chest.
She wanted another staring contest, and I did my part even though her eyes were disturbing, full of wildness.
She said, “What’s black on the outside and red on the inside?”
I didn’t know what she meant, what she wanted. I shook my head.
From a pocket of her lightweight jacket, she took a folding knife. Switchblade. Seven inches of razor-sharp steel flicked from the yellow handle. “I’m very serious, boy.”
I nodded.
“I like to cut. You believe I like to cut?”
“Yes.”
“Open the box.”
21
Using the blade of the knife, she probed through the contents of the box while I held it out to her. “Just crap,” she said.
“It’s all my stuff.”
“What—you’re in training to be some junk-crazed pack rat? What did you put in here when I was watching you from the doorway?”
“The eye.”
“What eye?”
“I found it in the alley. From a teddy bear or something.”
She picked it up between thumb and forefinger. “Why this?”
“I don’t know. It’s interesting.”
“Interesting? Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
She searched my eyes again, and then she rested the point of the knife on the tip of my nose. “Why?”
I was up against the wall, nowhere to go. Fear of the knife made me speechless.
She slid the blade into my left nostril. “Be very still, snoop. You move too suddenly, you’ll cut yourself. Why is this teddy-bear eye so interesting?”
“I thought it maybe had some juju.”
“Juju?”
“Yeah. Juju is—”
“I know what it is. Juju eye? You’re a real little freak in the making, aren’t you?”
She dropped the fabric eye into the box. Sparing my nose, she stirred the contents with the blade once more, but she quickly lost interest. “Put it away.”
After I put the box on the nightstand, I couldn’t take my eyes off the blade.
For maybe half a minute, she didn’t say anything, and neither did I, and finally she put the knife away. “Good thing you were lying about your mama coming home. If she’d walked in and seen me with that knife in my hand, I’d have used it on her and then on you. You love your mama, snoop?”
“Of course.”
“Not everyone does. Mine was a selfish bitch.”
I turned my attention to the window, to see if rain might be falling yet, though mostly so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“If you love your mama, then you think about what I said. I like to cut. I could make her a new face in half a minute. Look at me, boy.”
No rain yet.
“Don’t you dis me, boy.”
I looked at her.
“You understand me, how it is, how it has to be?”
“Yeah. I understand. No big deal.”
She turned away from me, crossed the room, opened the door.
I don’t know why I needed to make one more revelation, except that I was a small boy, rattled, and not thinking clearly. “In the nightmare, you were dead, and I was very sorry for you.”
On the threshold she turned and regarded me as when she’d first appeared: not with robotic indifference, as it had previously seemed to me, but with the contempt of a machine intelligence that despised weak creatures of flesh and blood.
“What’re you trying to do with this seeing-me-in-a-nightmare shit?”
“Nothing. I felt sorry, that’s all.”
“Am I supposed to be afraid? Is this a threat or something?”
“No. It’s just … the way it was. In the nightmare, I mean.”
“Then maybe you better not dream anymore.”
I almost spoke her name, so that she might believe me about the nightmare, but something stopped me, whether instinct or guardian angel, I can’t say.
“What? What is it?” she asked, as though she could almost read my mind.