CHAPTER 21

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT TO THE REDEEMER’S LAW PROJECT, YOU ARE COMING INTO THE STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS. YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE WILL BE FAR LESS CONFUSING IF YOU USE THE CHAPTER INDEX ON THE RIGHT TO GO BACK TO THE INTRODUCTION. OR AT LEAST TO THE PROLOGUE.

-- DAN

CHAPTER 21

Simon dropped away from another truck onto an ill-lit section of street.

He straightened his clothes, set off at an easy stroll down the sidewalk, and tried not to let his outward appearance reflect his emotions, which yawed wildly between rage and shame.

Absently he pulled an inch-long shard of glass out of his lower chest. He didn’t notice as the wound sucked the blood back in and sealed itself shut.

The sudden interruption of the proceedings had done nothing to stop his urge. He needed it. And hated himself for needing it. His mother and the house in Louisiana suddenly called to him, and he wanted to go home, but that line of thought slammed into the urge, which strummed along his nerves harder every second.

He’d have to do it. Again.

Briefly he thought about the man from the park, the man who’d put on a mask and chased after him. The man who...stepped into the darkness and...moved through it... Simon shut his eyes and waved his hands in the air. Couldn’t think about that. That wasn’t real. He said it over and over again, silently, and then out loud.

“That wasn’t real, you just imagined that. That couldn’t have been real.” That couldn’t have been real, because that would mean everything he’d ever been afraid of was true. Every imagined monster in his closet, or under his bed, all real, and he couldn’t deal with that.

Simon stopped abruptly and stared down at his hands. For the first time it hit him: the monster under the bed. The monster in the dark. Maybe it was the guy in the mask...but it was also him. Simon Grove, himself. The face in the mirror. The thing in the dark was him.

He felt more afraid than ever, and wanted to cry. Concentrate. Come on, think about something else!

Simon glanced around him as he walked, taking in his surroundings.

He’d only been in Atlanta for five days, and was still unfamiliar with it. He didn’t recognize the place where the truck had unknowingly delivered him. The dull, steady vibrations of I-285 hummed from a nearby overpass. The street he now walked down appeared to lead into a low-income housing district after it passed under the freeway.

Up a steep hill on his right, however, a brightly lit apartment complex looked out over the city. The units, stacked three levels high, presented perfectly square faces, white stucco faded to gray, decorated with wrought iron railings on patios and balconies. Straight out of the sixties, Simon thought. He looked over his shoulder and saw an entrance to the complex, a steep blacktop drive winding up the hill. He reversed his course and walked quickly toward the sign.

Bright lights artfully concealed in low shrubbery illuminated the words.

“Crestwood View,” Simon read aloud. He started up the smooth, recently paved drive, and whistled a tune.

The drive was lit better than the street it branched off of. Every sixty feet or so a street lamp overhung the way, giving Simon enough light to notice a macadam jogging trail that wound its way down the hillside, crossed the drive, and angled back up toward the apartments. He eyed the path and thought for a moment about late-night joggers, but then a car’s headlights washed over him.

He stopped walking and raised a hand to shield his eyes.

A late-model Chrysler made its way up the drive, and thanks to the street lamps’ illumination Simon could see the driver. He locked eyes with her for a long, heart-stopping moment before she rolled past him.

Simon remained perfectly still, stared after her, and savored her image like an aftertaste.

Then he sprinted after the car.

Its taillights had already disappeared around a bend in the drive, so he didn’t worry about her seeing his pursuit, though he did have to hold himself back to keep from catching up with her. He’d discovered he could move at a good thirty or forty miles an hour when he tried.

Long, red-gold hair.

Simon knew he had to have her. At the top of the hill he stopped, ducked down behind a hedge, and scanned the parking lot. No cars moved, no doors thumped shut, so he dashed to the edge of the first building, where the lot turned to the left. There. He saw the Chrysler pull into a space in front of a building with a three-foot-high letter G on it, and the woman got out. He couldn’t see her face clearly at this distance, but her athletic body was visible enough, and he felt the twinge, the need to change, and fought it back.

Light eyes, blue, maybe green. Wide mouth.

She went to the trunk, opened it, got out two small bags of groceries. Then she disappeared into the front central door of the building. Access was only possible through one of the two central doors; all the doors to the apartments opened onto a long hall down the building’s middle. Simon almost panicked. He couldn’t see her anymore, had no way of knowing where she was, and his throat began to close up with the anxiety.

He ran across the parking lot, almost on all fours in his haste, and came up hard against the back of her car, his breathing ragged and his eyes glued to her building.

Simon gasped with relief when a light came on in one of the second-floor apartments. A silhouette moved over the blinds, and he crawled around to the side of her car, trying to calm down a little. He drew his knees up to his chest and sat there, his fingers clenched into white-knuckled fists.

Simon could feel the bones of his jaw loosen, and he ground his teeth together. He saw his mother’s face, so sad and disapproving whenever she caught him doing something wrong. He couldn’t imagine what she’d say if she caught him like this. I’m sorry, Mama. I’ve tried to stop, I have, I promise. He tried to think of something, anything but the woman, but he knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

“Ace of spades,” he mumbled into his knees. “King of spades. Queen of spades. Jack of spades.” Simon worked his way down to the deuce, then started with diamonds. At the ten of diamonds he felt in control of himself enough to stand up, so he made his way as quickly as he could around the building to the back side, and clung to the wall once he got there. Maybe...maybe if he just saw her. Maybe that would be enough.

The view was impressive. The hill hadn’t looked all that high from the street below, but the Crestwood View apartments weren’t kidding about the View part. A strip of grass about ten yards wide separated the complex from an almost sheer drop of roughly fifty feet, tumbling down to end at the street where Simon had begun his climb. A chest-high chain link fence ran the length of the drop-off, protection for careless toddlers and drunken college students. Simon crept out to the fence, trying to keep in the deepest of the shadows, and looked back up at the apartments.

The railings of the second-floor balconies leered down at him like multiple sets of teeth, and he felt afraid. His jaw was back to normal, and his hands unclenched after some effort. He rubbed the joints of his left hand, lingered over them, paused to work his ring finger back and forth. He pulled, and the knuckle popped.

Simon sank down against the rust-spotted fence and began to cry.

The urge wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been, not now. He could walk away. Walk away, find a phone, call his house, call his mother. She’d know what to tell him, know where he could go. Maybe...maybe she could tell him what he needed to do to keep from...from doing it anymore. It wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all, and he knew it. How many nights had he screamed himself awake from the nightmares? How many nights since it first happened? He remembered the look on her face, in her eyes, remembered, ha, he couldn’t make himself forget, when she heard about what had happened at the neighbors’ house. He knew all the stories in the paper by heart. Every word.

He knew another word.

Addict.

Simon got to his feet, forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply. He touched his jaw, his eyes, and held his hands up in front of his face. They were thin and pale and normal.

“Can I do this? Can I just, can I just stop? Can I quit?” The sound of his own voice seemed very small and weak.

The light in the woman’s apartment came on just then, and Simon shoved his hands behind his back with a small whimper. A sliding glass door opened, and she came out onto the balcony, her red-golden hair turned dark in the moonlight. He stood, rooted, waiting for her to scream and disappear into the apartment—but she stayed there for long minutes, staring out at the city, before she turned and went back inside.

She hadn’t seen him.

Too bad for her.

His eyes hard white pinpoints, Simon crept across the strip of lawn, his torso long and pale and brushing the grass. His movements were quick and fluid and sure, and as his joints reconfigured themselves, things like heavy white worms writhed below his wrists.

# # #

Darlie Gilbert closed the glass door to her balcony but didn’t lock it. She planned on going back out as soon as her hot chocolate was ready, to relax in her white plastic lawn chair and prop her feet up on the railing. Darlie emptied the essentials from her purse, as she always did, placing wallet and keys and loose change on the kitchen counter next to the microwave, ready to transfer to another handbag. She had seven different ones.

Attached to the keys was a canister of pepper spray, an item her father had practically demanded she carry.

“If you insist on living alone,” he’d said, about four thousand times, “the least you can do is keep some protection with you.”

Protection from the big bad men out there. Darlie smiled to herself. At five feet ten inches tall and one hundred sixty-eight pounds, Darlie was very nearly solid muscle, and wasn’t afraid of much. Still, no harm in granting her dad’s request.

She contemplated the young man she’d seen on the way in, the dark-and-handsome type who’d stared at her as she drove past. She hadn’t seen him around the complex before, but that didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t sure who lived two doors down from her, for that matter. Maybe she’d look for him around the laundry room.

While she waited for the water to boil she pressed the “message playback” button on her answering machine. The first recording was her boss at the art gallery, where she worked as Assistant Manager, a job which ranged from giving tours to arranging exhibits to helping with the framing. He wanted her to work an extra shift next week because of the new paintings from Matt Sinclair, which were scheduled to show up on Tuesday. She smiled at that, and felt a tiny thrill; she hoped Sinclair’s new pieces would be as electrifying as his previous ones.

The other message was from her father, who called her every three days, “to make sure you’re all right.” She listened to both of them carefully and hit REWIND, just as the kettle began its steam-driven harmonica chime.

As she poured the water into a Kermit the Frog coffee mug she heard a thump on her balcony. Frowning, she put the kettle back on the eye and moved to look around the corner, expecting to see one of the several stray cats that made their rounds of the neighborhood. Before she could tell what had caused the sound, however, she heard the latch click open, which only caused her a bit of puzzlement in the half-second she had to think about it. Then she rounded the corner from the kitchen to the living room.

The Kermit mug crashed to the floor as her arm spasmed. Her lungs wouldn’t work, and she stood in the kitchen doorway in silence and watched.

Something that might have been a man stepped from Darlie’s balcony into her apartment and grinned at her. Eyes like two tiny search beams speared out from its face, set deep above an impossibly distended jaw that bristled with slickly glistening spines. Its chest and legs were normal, but the arms were half again as long as a regular human’s, and the hands... Wormlike, dead-white tentacles squirmed and writhed where the fingers should have been, ten undulating tendrils at least two feet long, each one terminating in a sharp, bony point. The creature spread its arms wide, and the finger-tendrils fanned out and lengthened until they tapped and scraped the walls and ceiling. Grotesquely, it wore normal clothing, a black T-shirt and charcoal gray jeans.

Darlie’s breathing stopped as she made a connection. The guy on the road.

“Yoo aghe ee doo ghis,” the creature said, and repeated the words, and she realized what it meant: You made me do this.

It crouched, pulled the fingers back in and coiled to leap at her.

Darlie pulled the can of pepper spray off the counter and fired a stream directly into the creature’s eyes.

Two seconds later both her ears began to bleed as every piece of glass in the apartment shattered.

The creature sucked in air for another scream and flailed toward her, but she backed up against the wall and fired again, and this time hit not only the creature’s eyes but also its open mouth. It screamed again, louder than a jet engine, than ten jet engines, and Darlie thought her skull would come apart.

As she watched, the jaw wriggled and retracted, became human again, and the creature shouted, “Ow! Ow! Shit shit shit shit! Motherfucker!”

The writhing tentacles gouged runnels out of the walls and ceiling and tore gashes in the carpet as the creature jerked and twisted like a tornado. It ran and smashed its way back out through the sliding doors as if they’d been made of construction paper.

Just before it jumped over the railing of her balcony, Darlie heard the creature scream, “Bitch!”

She stood with her knees locked and stared after it, and finally realized she still had the plunger pressed on the can of pepper spray. She took her thumb away from it. She further realized she wasn’t completely deaf when she heard the neighbors banging on her door.

# # #

Simon hit the ground badly and felt the bones of his shoulder break. He heaved up off the ground and got away from the apartment as fast as he could, propelling himself forward as much with his extended fingers as with his feet. His eyes felt as if they’d been scooped out of his head and replaced with burning wads of napalm, and each breath he took drew acidic fumes into his lungs. He didn’t see the fence until he’d crashed into it, and didn’t remember its significance until he’d levered himself over it.

The slick grass of the hillside offered no traction at all as he fell. The rock outcropping he met halfway down could have provided a handhold if he hadn’t been agonized and blinded. As it was, his bad shoulder slammed directly into it. Another jet-engine scream tore out of him, abruptly cut off when he bounced off the trunk of a sturdy sapling. He felt his ribs splinter.

Simon rolled to a stop in the ditch along the street where he’d originally jumped off the eighteen-wheeler. All his insides seemed to have changed into tiny, sharp-edged rocks that ground together when he breathed. His vision began to clear, just the tiniest bit, but his eyes and mouth and lungs still burned unbearably.

He closed his eyes and tried to shy away when a car pulled to a stop on the street and headlights fell on him.

Two sets of footsteps approached through the grass. Even through the pain, the urge was still there, lingering at the back of everything with a needling, despicable insistence. His fingers were still extended, and with a feeble grasping twitch he tried to send them toward whoever made the footsteps.

A man’s voice said, “Oh...sweet God.”

A woman spoke, sharply. “We can’t let anybody see him. Come on, give me a hand here.”

Simon felt a sharp sting on his neck, separate from all the other pain, and his limbs went completely numb. Two people grabbed him roughly under the arms and legs and lifted, and he realized he’d been dropped into the trunk of a car just before the lid slammed closed and he blacked out.




AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.