And Crock? Crock still had his head between his knees. So I was the only one who saw the guy. And real thing or wannabe, he was here, he wasn’t vomiting into a storm drain, and his eyes weren’t yellow and unfocused, like the drunk in the tinfoil hat. We needed help and we needed it now.
I went right up to the guy in the thousand-dollar suit. Even his eyes were freaky and mismatched, like the real Bowie’s. One of them was all pupil.
“Hey, mister,” I said. “Can you help us out? My friend here is sick and we can’t find my car. Have you seen it? It’s a ’78 Gremlin. Maalox colored.”
Bowie casually lit a cigarette, crooked a finger that meant Follow me, and disappeared back into the shadows.
I still don’t know why I followed him. What kind of idiot was I, following a strange man into a brewery where they brewed teenage girls? I could’ve been jumped. I could’ve gotten my throat cut, my punk ass cooked. Following that guy was dangerously stupid.
I knew all this, but Evan needed help. Without my car, I couldn’t get him home.
I took my first step into the darkness. Then another. And another, sure I was about to bonk into a brick wall. But I didn’t, because there was no wall where Bowie had disappeared. There was open air, a space wider than my arm span. It had been camouflaged in the shadows.
Two steps later, my whole body slammed into something huge and metallic that smelled like garbage and had a hollow ring to it.
Another dumpster.
I felt along its sides, and when it ended, my knees rammed into something just as metallic, only pointier. The grille of my car.
I pulled the keys out of my back pocket and felt my way to Ginny’s driver’s side, unlocking the door. The interior light came on, and there was the chocolate/cherry upholstery. I sank into it, running my hands along the dash. I may have kissed the steering wheel.
I was about to start the engine when there was a rap on my window. I jumped into the stratosphere.
Two great mismatched eyes were staring at me from under a cap of poufy yellow hair.
I cranked the window down.
“You need to get your mate some aspirin. The All-Nite Pantry on Burnside’s still open.”
I closed my eyes and listened to his voice. It was lyrical—even the English accent had overtones.
I wasn’t a shaking-hands kind of guy, but I held out my hand anyway. “Thanks, mister . . .??”
“You can call me Ziggy,” he said, thrusting his own hands in his pockets. Apparently he wasn’t the shaking-hands type either.
“Thanks, Ziggy. We were in a bad way.” I started the engine.
See? I thought to myself. Nothing freaky about him. No hunting knife. Just a well-dressed look-alike who’d happened to save our asses.
And just as I convinced myself that everything was normal, Ziggy said something that blew me into the stratosphere again.
“Oh, and Noah, you need to show them the flyer in your pocket. There’s a darkness coming. I know you can feel it. Someone needs to make a stand, son. It has to be here. It has to be you.”
With that, he stood back, hitched up his collar, rapped twice on the roof of my car, strolled back into the shadows, and was gone.