One-Eyed Jack (26 page)

“
But
it
didn’t work
,” Jack insisted. “They still can’t see you.”

“
What’s he talking about?”
the guard asked me.

“
He has an invisible
friend,” I said.

“
Isn’t he a little old for
that?”

I shrugged.

But I’m not
hungry
, Jenny said.
And I feel like a real mother again, with so much of Andrew
inside me.

“
But
they can’t
see
you,” Jack insisted. He glanced at the guard, then turned
back to Jenny. “You still aren’t a live person.”

It doesn’t
matter.

“
It matters to me!” His
shout caught the attention of the guard and the guy in scrubs, but
they just stared, they didn’t move any closer. I resisted the urge
to shush the kid; after all, at this point, what difference could
it make?

The monster’s happiness
was tinged ever so faintly with pity now.
Poor Jack. I’m sorry you couldn’t really love me as I
am.

“
I
do
love you!”

She shook her head, and I
noticed that the blood seemed to be fading from her hair – not
drying, but vanishing.
If you really loved
me, you would have fed me yourself. Andrew loved me, and I loved
Andrew.

“
You killed
him!”

I loved him.

“
She’s insane,” I
murmured. “She’s a monster.”

“
I’m not sure you two
should be talking,” the guard said.

“
Sorry,” I
said.

“
Will you be back at the
tree when they let me go?” Jack asked, finally managing to speak
quietly again, rather than shouting.

Oh, no,
sweetie
, Jenny said, grinning broadly and
displaying what seemed like far too many teeth. The pity, never
strong, had vanished.
I don’t need to go
back there, now that you’ve shown me where there are so many other
children to love.

Jack’s face froze. I think mine might
have, too.

That was when the door swung open and
Ben Skees stepped in.

“
You two,” he said,
gesturing at us. “Come with me.”

“
Excuse me, but...” the
guard began, but then Skees held up his badge.

“
You’re welcome to
accompany us, sir, but the boy’s parents are on their way, and I’d
like a chance to talk to him before they get here.” He glanced at
Jack. “And to get him cleaned up; we don’t want his mother to see
him like that.”

“
Come on,” I said, getting
to my feet.

“
But...” Jack gestured
toward Jenny.

“
Come on,” I
repeated.

Goodbye
, Jenny said.
Thank you, Jack.
Goodbye.

I looked at her, and I saw a spot of
white fabric reappear at her shoulder. The blood was fading
away.

I think Jack saw it, too. He stood up,
and he and I followed Detective Skees out of the lounge, and then
out of the hospital.

From her spot on the floor, Jenny
watched us leave. She waved a farewell, but made no move to follow
us.

I’d assumed Jack would be interviewed
by a cop or two, maybe a social worker, and then returned to his
parents. There was a little more to it than that. This wasn’t just
a missing child anymore. This was now a possible homicide. Andrew
had died, and it didn’t look like natural causes.

That meant Skees wasn’t in charge; he
worked missing persons, domestic disturbances, and the like, not
homicide. An older man named McDonough was in charge. Skees was
still involved, though, since Jack had been his case. Skees took us
to the police station, looked us over, made sure that none of the
blood on Jack was his own, got him into a clean T-shirt, and then
turned us over to the homicide boys.

Jack and I were questioned separately,
and at length. I assume they let Jack’s parents see him at some
point, but he wasn’t going home, not that night.

Neither was I.

I thought I was going to have trouble
answering their questions; I thought I would have to dodge a lot,
maybe lie outright, to avoid being labeled a nutcase. Didn’t
happen. The homicide cops didn’t really care about me; they were
focused on what had happened to Andrew.

I’d never met Andrew. I could say that
honestly. I’d never met him, never seen him, never spoken with him.
I was at the hospital looking for Jack, and found him coming out of
Andrew’s room with blood all over him – that was my story. I’d
never heard of Andrew before tonight, never heard Jack mention him.
All the simple truth.

They never asked why I was in
Lexington, or why I was looking for Jack; that wasn’t their
department.

They did ask if I knew anything about
this Jenny that Jack talked about, and I said that Jack hadn’t
really told me much about her – which was true; I’d seen and heard
her for myself, Jack didn’t need to say anything – but that my
impression was that Jack believed he could see and hear a ghost
named Jenny, who served as a sort of mother figure for him. Jack
and I had talked about her a little when I visited him in the
hospital after he lost his eye.

They never asked if
I
could see her, so I
didn’t have to lie. They stayed focused on Andrew. Had Jack really
never mentioned him? Had I ever seen Jack in the company of any
dangerous strangers? Had I gone in Andrew’s room? Had I looked in
the door? Had Jack ever said what happened to his eye? Had he
blamed Andrew for ruining it? Had he blamed Andrew for his lost
finger?

I kept telling them that I had never
heard of Andrew, that I was at the hospital because I thought Jack
might have wanted to find a baby for Jenny to cuddle, and that it
was pure dumb luck that I spotted him on the plaza and followed him
into the cancer center.

I had a dozen witnesses who could
affirm that I wasn’t in Andrew’s room – nurses, doctors, and other
staff. I had no blood on my clothes. I wasn’t a suspect, just a guy
who had been in the area.

So after maybe an hour and a half,
they were done with me.

They didn’t release me immediately,
though; they left me waiting on a hard chair in a small room.
That’s where Ben Skees found me.

“
Okay,” he said, as he sat
down opposite me. “What happened?”

“
Hypothetically?” I asked
wearily.

“
If you want to tell it
that way, sure.”

“
Jack found another kid
for Jenny. I was wrong – he didn’t want a baby for her, he wanted
someone who was dying anyway, someone he could convince to
cooperate because he didn’t have anything to lose. He found one, I
guess – a kid with leukemia he’d met in the cafeteria last
month.”

“
And how
did
you
happen to be there?”

“
I was checking out the
birthing center, and wound up leaving by the wrong door and came
out in that side-street instead of on Limestone, I guess it’s Rose
Street, and I saw Jack there. I wanted to call you, but I’d left my
phone in the car – it’s probably still there, on the front seat
where I dropped it. I didn’t want to lose sight of Jack, so I
followed him, and he met Jenny in the plaza and led her inside, to
Andrew’s room. I got turned around and lost them, but when Andrew
started screaming I followed the sound. I didn’t get there in time
to do anything except keep Jack out of the way of the doctors.” I
shrugged. “That’s it.”

“
So Jack led the ghost to
the McPhee kid?”

“
I don’t know Andrew’s
last name; I only know his name was Andrew because that’s what Jack
called him. I never saw him.”

“
Andrew McPhee, age
eleven, leukemia not responding to treatment. We got the same story
from Jack that you did, that he’d met Andrew last month and they
hit it off.”

“
Is Andrew dead? No one’s
actually told me.” I had a brief moment of mad, totally unrealistic
hope – Skees was here talking to me, and he wasn’t in
homicide.

“
Oh, yeah.” Skees
grimaced. “Several pieces missing, including his heart. He’s dead,
all right.”

That irrational hope vanished. “I’m
sorry.”

“
So’s his mother. Father’s
out of the picture, apparently.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I
repeated, “I’m sorry.”

“
So your story is that
this ghost tried to eat him?”

“
She
did
eat him, or at least all she could.” I shuddered. “She was
covered in blood from her shoulders to her knees.”

“
You
saw
her?”

“
Afterwards, yeah. She
came to that room we were in, to talk to Jack.”

Skees looked at me for a moment, then
down at the floor, then back at me.

“
Just how common is it,”
he asked, “for a ghost to kill someone? I thought they were mostly
harmless, couldn’t hurt the living.”

I shrugged again. “I have no idea how
common it is. Not very, I’d guess. This is the second confirmed
case I’ve heard of in the eight years I’ve been involved with this
stuff.”

“
That’s
more than I’d ever heard of,” Skees replied. “Look, I’m a cop; we
share stories about the weird stuff we see on the job, and we do
get weird ones, but except for horror movies I have
never
heard about ghosts
killing people before. This isn’t even friend of a friend, I heard
this but don’t know if it’s true stuff; this just
doesn’t happen
, except
in horror movies and campfire stories. People see ghosts, yeah, but
the ghosts don’t hurt people. So how come it happened
here?”

I shook my head. “I don’t
know. There are a lot of malicious things out there – ghosts, if
you want to call them that, and other things, too. I’ve seen them
creeping around, stalking women, trying to hit people, things like
that, but they can’t hurt you; they aren’t solid enough to
harm
anything
.
Jenny’s an exception. I don’t know why. I have a theory that maybe
they get stronger if people interact with them, so maybe she got
dangerous because Jack spent so much time with her. I don’t
know
, I don’t know
anything for sure, but that seems to be how it works.”

“
How can people interact
with them, though? They’re fucking invisible!”

“
Some people can see them.
I can. Jack can. Mrs. Reinholt, my high school teacher, could,
until one of them killed her. The original Jenny Derdiarian used to
be able to, but lost the ability fifteen years ago when her ghost
split off – I guess it took the talent with it. Over the years I’ve
found a few other people who could see them, too. No one around
here, though.”

“
One of them killed your
teacher?”

It figured that he’d focus on that.
“Yeah. That was the other case I know of. She’d learned to use them
to do... well, magic, more or less. Witchcraft. Curses. Except the
more she used them, the stronger they got, and eventually one of
them got tired of being bossed around and tore her head
off.”

“
You mean that
literally?”

I looked him in the eye. “Yeah, I
do.”

He considered that for a moment, then
asked, “Was the head still there when they found the
body?”

I really didn’t like to think about
that. I closed my eyes. “Yeah,” I said. “The head was there. You
said some pieces of Andrew aren’t?”

“
That’s right. And I’d
like to know why the two are different.”

“
The one that killed Mrs.
Reinholt wasn’t interested in eating anyone – it was just pissed at
her. Jenny isn’t angry, but she’s got food and love and guilt all
tangled together. She’s obsessed with killing children and eating
them.”

“
Eating kids.”

“
That’s right.”

“
So she ate
Andrew.”

“
Apparently. I didn’t see
it.” I didn’t mention that I had felt how much she’d enjoyed it –
or that Jack had, as well.

Skees contemplated me for a moment,
then said, “Two doctors and three nurses did see it. They didn’t
all want to talk about it at first because they thought we’d think
they were nuts, but once we got them started it all came out. When
they got there, Andrew was still alive – his hand was gone, and his
throat and shoulder were badly torn up, but he was still
breathing.

“
Except then more of him
disappeared. The doctor who first told us about it said he’d never
seen anything like it, and it didn’t make any sense, but pieces of
the boy’s chest were tearing loose and vanishing. Nothing they did
could stop it or even slow it down.”

I made a noise.

“
Eventually his heart
disappeared, right out of his chest. That was when they gave up and
pronounced him dead.”