Silverwood Page 14

  Henry, seeing the dog’s face appear in the rear window, knows that it is time to move. He makes a low whistling sound. No response. Mom and Chester seem to be around the corner of the building, unable to hear him. He turns and runs down the aisle of cars, just in time to hear the Maverick’s engine roar as Helen fires the thing up. Where is that reverse gear again? She’s seen her mom do this so many times. She’s even tried it herself before. But this time, she can’t crash or kill the engine.

  The coupe stirs up a storm of dust as it rumbles down the aisle. Henry breaks into a jog next to it, pulls the chrome handle to open the passenger door, and jumps in.

  “‘Scuse me, Clarence,” Henry says as he crawls over into the back of the car. Clarence doesn’t move so Henry stuffs himself into one side.

  Kate, who now knows more about the ‘freewheeling mobile home lifestyle’ than she ever wanted to, appears around the corner of the building and breaks into a full run. Helen turns and steers toward the exit, taking one last glance at the station wagon. In a split second Kate comes alongside, tossing her duffle bag through the door and swinging into the passenger seat.

  Chester stands and watches his car exit the lot, dumbfounded. He will most certainly be demanding a refund on those anti-theft devices. The face of the dog in the back window shrinks until the whole car is just a blue dot on the interstate.

  The Country Squire wagon will leave a hefty crater in front of Chester Motors when it explodes. Chester will not file a police report. Instead he will transform the crater into a tourist attraction, claiming that a spaceship crash-landed in that very spot, and selling bits of the melted station wagon as authentic pieces of the ill-fated saucer.

  Three days after the explosion, a man dressed entirely in black will appear and buy the motorcycle with the sidecar.

  “Howdy, kitty.”

  Daniel Brush stands, arms crossed, pondering the cat parked atop the stack of books in his uncle’s shop. The cat looks back. They stay this way for a good while, sizing each other up.

  “Hey, now that the creepy guy is gone, I was wondering if you’d let me get a look at that book you’re so attached to there,” Daniel says.

  Amazingly, the cat gets up, stretches its back, and steps down. It doesn’t go far, though. It hunkers down right next to the volume and watches Daniel.

  Daniel waits a moment to be sure he won’t get shredded. “I’ll put it back, I promise. Right where you kept it.” He reaches out, slowly, careful to keep clear of his feline friend, and lifts the book off the table. The leather cover gives off dust and fragments that flicker in the sunlight from the window. The thick embossed letters on the front spell, REGRETS.

  “Regrets, huh? Sounds uplifting.” He flips it open.

  The pages, made of yellow parchment and brownish around the edges, appear to be blank.

  Daniel turns page after page but he sees no words, no pictures, nothing. As he looks through the volume, though, he thinks he hears a sound. A rustling, or maybe a distant howling. He looks toward the front of the shop for some source, but no one appears. No tinkle of the bell. He turns back to the book and the sounds continue. He can’t quite place it. It’s a little like the sound of faraway traffic in a busy city.

  Each time he comes closer to the book, the sound gets louder. Where is this weird noise coming from? He leans down, bringing his ear almost in contact with the page. Is it a trick of the wind, or an echo?

  Daniel turns another page, and the sounds grow louder. He turns more pages, and things quiet down. Noises are coming and going as he flips through the book. Now he holds very still. Why can’t he pinpoint that sound?

  The cat stares at him.

  Faint wails. Or moans. Such sad sounds.

  Daniel looks up at the cat. “Are those sounds coming from the book? Are they the sounds of regrets? Are there people’s regrets in here? People’s pasts?”

  The cat gives away nothing.

  Daniel closes the book, and the sounds subside.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? The Book of Regrets. And are you the self-appointed protector of this thing?” He places it back where it was, and the cat retakes its position on top. “It certainly isn’t your average hardback.”

  “That,” a voice says behind him, “is a corner piece of a very large and complicated puzzle.”

  Daniel spins around, knocking books off the shelf behind him. At least when the books land on the floor they don’t raise a huge cloud of dust. Daniel’s meager attempts at cleaning are starting to pay off.

  Eleanor Woods, proprietress of the Brokeneck Hotel, stands at the center of the aisle.

  Daniel first knew Mrs. Woods when he was a little boy visiting his uncle. She was the kindly older lady who ran the hotel, but she had the sort of demeanor that made you think the hotel really wasn’t the whole story. She gave off a vibe like she ran some secret spy operation out of the back rooms or something. Daniel always figured he just added these details from his imagination, being a creative young kid. Now that he’s grown, Mrs. Woods is about half Daniel’s size—probably a third of the size of that other fellow who came in.

  Mrs. Woods leans to one side and peers around Daniel. “Hello Bertrand,” Mrs. Woods says to the cat. The cat does not move.

  “What kind of puzzle?” Daniel asks.

  “That book is a piece of a great machine,” Mrs. Woods explains. “An ancient machine. Unfortunately, it has gotten separated from the other parts. Sometimes when something is very powerful, it is also dangerous. To avert the danger, people take the machine apart so it can’t work any more. This,” she gestures toward the book on the table, “is a part of that sort of machine.”

  “Okay,” Daniel says, furrowing his brow and looking at Bertrand. Bertrand? What a dumb name for a cat.

  “I saw you had a visitor earlier,” Mrs. Woods says. “A large fellow, not terribly attractive. He came in here after Posey made her rounds and got her video of me through your window. Am I correct?”

  Man, small town life is weird. Everybody knows everything about each other. “Yeah, that’s right,” Daniel says. “You had a visitor too, it looked like.”

  “I did have a visitor, which is why I came to see you,” Mrs. Woods says. “Our two visits are related. You see, your fellow was after something, and mine gave me something to make sure that he doesn’t get it.” She holds out her hand so Daniel can see the portal.

  “What’s that?” Daniel asks.

  “Another piece of the machine,” Mrs. Woods says. “With this, I can create an area—about the size of my hotel—where folks like that ugly character you encountered can’t go.”

  She hands the object to Daniel, who turns it over a few times and looks through the hole in the middle.

  “It’s called a portal,” Mrs. Woods explains. “It’s a carrier of information, and a conduit through space and time. This particular one is calibrated in a special way. I had to make special arrangements to have it brought here. There’s no way in tarnation I could have fixed up one of these myself.”

  “I had one of these when I was a kid,” Daniel says. The look of the coin, with the square hole and swirling shape on one side, brings back a flood of memories; playing out behind the bookstore, his uncle letting him pick one of these out of the cash register, his aunt admonishing him to be careful with it, the grown-ups discussing was it proper for a child to play with such things, wondering aloud what might happen if it still had information on it…

  “Piece of the puzzle, huh?” Daniel says, handing the portal back to Mrs. Woods.

  “Yes, I… ”

  Bertrand lets out a howl as a new, huge creature storms into the store, sending stacks of books crashing everywhere. The cat sinks its claws into the cover of The Book of Regrets and arches his back, wailing.

  Daniel wheels around just in time to receive a blow to the side of his head, sending him sideways into a bookshelf with a crash.

  “Aw man!” Daniel yells, clutching at his skull. “Another one. Why do these peopl
e have to attack you right when they come in? Can’t we talk first?”

  “Get your stupid cat out of the way. That book is ours and we will have it!”The Tromindox bellows.

  “What, did your friend send you to finish the job?” Daniel says. He doesn’t see Mrs. Woods any more. Where is she, and why did she disappear? Did this creature scare her off?

  “Your previous visitor is an idiot. I never should have relied on him. Now, the book.” It moves toward the volume in question. Bertrand emits a long, serious, low growling sound.

  “Daniel, this way!” Mrs. Woods calls from the front door. How did she get there? Daniel scoops up the book and the cat in one motion, fakes in one direction (it turns out soccer practice was good for something) and then leaps sideways to the next aisle. He takes off in a sprint toward the front of the shop.

  The Tromindox attempts to grab Daniel, jabbing its claws in between the shelves. For once the clutter gives Daniel an advantage. He flails his free arm and hurls stacks of books and a table to the floor behind him. The Tromindox, momentarily tangled in the mess strewn in its path, roars in anger.

  The dirt roadway between the bookstore and the front porch of the Brokeneck Hotel stretches out in front of Daniel; no choice now but to take off in a full run. He hurdles the railing in front of the store and from there, keeps his feet pumping with his arms still tightly wrapped around the book and the cat. Mrs. Woods has somehow reached the hotel porch before him and yells back at him like she is cheering at a track meet: “Come on Daniel! You can do it!” The liquid Tromindox slithers out the door and across the dirt behind him.

  How did Mrs. Woods get over there so quickly? That lady is tricky.

  Daniel reaches the porch and leaps up the steps, but a Tromindox tentacle catches him around his ankle and yanks him down to the ground. He lands hard, his chest hitting the wood and the book flying out in front of him and landing about ten feet away. The cat’s trajectory takes it in another direction and it alights on its feet, hissing.

  Daniel hears a whirring sound, then a click, and looks up to see Mrs. Woods, standing defiantly in the hotel entrance, holding a small device. In an instant she shoves the portal into the side of it, and when she does, the Tromindox lets out a horrible howl. Several of its tentacles fall off and seem to boil away in the dust. It stumbles backward.

  And then, the Tromindox melts.

  As the creature sinks to the ground into a thick glob of black oily goo, human faces appear; popping out here and there, remnants of past victims. Identities absorbed. These are just echoes: other people’s lives flashing before Daniel’s eyes. The Tromindox shrinks and evaporates, smaller and smaller until it leaves only a damp bit of gravel on the ground.

  “Bugger off, you vile creature!” Mrs. Woods yells at the smear. “This here hotel is now a field which none of you beasts may enter. Too bad you are in no shape to go inform your friends.”

  Daniel scrambles backward like a crab up the hotel steps, never taking his eyes off the spot where the creature dissolved.

  “What, what did you do?” he asks.

  “Disruption field,” Mrs. Woods says. “Those Tromindox, they’re shape shifters, see. Changing around all the time. So their molecules don’t stay together as well as yours and mine. There’s more space between them. If you activate a field at the right frequency, you can blow them up. They fall apart at the molecular level.”

  Mrs. Woods smooths her apron and looks up the street. “I’m not pleased that I was forced to activate it so soon. I had hoped to wait longer. My guests haven’t even arrived yet.”

  Daniel sits in the bright front window of the Brokeneck Hotel, flipping pages in The Book of Regrets. The sun has moved down a bit now, no longer blasting through the glass. An hour ago it would have been too stifling hot to sit here.

  But now, it’s cooled off. Daniel turns the crinkly pages, one at a time, and listens.

  The regrets started out unintelligible. Moans, sighs, sounds of longing, a little bit of anger, a lot of sadness. But the longer Daniel listens, the more he feels like he can understand a word or two here and there. It’s as if the sounds get a tiny bit clearer with each turn of the page.

  And then, he hears it. Clearly, this time. It’s the unmistakable noise of a playground, kids running and yelling. He can hear voices, taunting. They sound mean. Mean laughter. And then it hits him.

  He is hearing a day when he was nine years old, in school. A group of boys had surrounded a girl. What was her name?

  “Lucy! Lucy Goosey!” the book says, clear as day.

  Lucy.

  “Lucy Goosey, why don’t you go jump off a cliff, Lucy? Nobody wants to see your face.”

  “Lucy, Lucy, loser Lucy… ”

  It goes on like this. Daniel finds himself there, every detail coming back to him now. How Lucy endured the taunts. How those boys never let up. How she walked home, feet moving fast, head down, her dress dirty and her braids lopsided.

  How Daniel saw the whole thing, and did nothing. Just shuffled his sneakers in the dirt, soles making a crunching sound. Fingers looped in the chain link fence. Turning, to walk home alone. If he said anything, tried to make them stop, he endured a beating. He remembers the feeling of wet blood on the back of his head. Scraped up elbows where he went down. He knew what to expect.

  Daniel was Lucy’s only friend in school.

  He watched as they ran after her, still yelling. Sometimes tripping her. Sometimes knocking her books out of her hand. Lucy was their favorite target, but Daniel knew it could just as easily have been him.

  The girls were even worse.

  They never said anything to Lucy’s face, of course. It was all rolled eyes and little looks in the classroom, sitting around the lunch table making up poems about Lucy the Loser, always working in something about her being fat, or ugly, or worse. The girls could be very, very creative in their cruelty.

  They could compare Lucy to any animal, maybe a hippo, or a cow, anything, even make it rhyme or set it to music. Daniel remembers it all.

  And, he remembers the two of them, friends, hiking through the woods, looking for snakes or just hanging around together. Watching TV. Riding bikes. Finding deer bones and taking them home to write labels on them with a marker.

  But mostly Daniel remembers that feeling of watching through the fence. Shuffling his feet. And doing nothing.

  He still gets a knot in his stomach whenever he thinks of Lucy. He never saw her after she moved away. But that knot in his stomach, that sticks. So does the sound of his rushing heartbeat in his ears, thumping loudly.

  The thing is, there was absolutely nothing remarkable about Lucy. She didn’t resemble a hippo, or a cow. She just happened to be the chosen one, picked out for torment. It was the lottery of childhood. A place for kids to put all their aggression, all those mean feelings they are not supposed to have because the grown-ups say such feelings are bad. But it’s there, under the surface. Anger, meanness, aggression. It’s part of human nature. You can’t just pretend it’s not there. It’s going to come out someplace.

  At Daniel’s school, the outlet was Lucy.

  “I would not spend too much time flipping through that book, if I were you,” Mrs. Woods says, appearing at Daniel’s elbow. Daniel starts, and instinctively closes the book with a thud. He feels a flood of relief as the dull pain of the memory subsides.

  “That book can get you in trouble, you know. It’s dangerous.”

  “You’re probably right,” Daniel says. He straightens. “So, what now?”

  “You will need to stay here in the hotel,” says Mrs. Woods. “You’re on the radar, now. They know who you are, and they will try to get you to give up the book.” She slides The Book of Regrets off the table and installs it in a massive wooden cabinet, closing the glass doors tightly.

  “And who are they, exactly?” Daniel asks.

  “The Tromindox,” Mrs. Woods says. “Ancient creatures. Human hunters. Brilliant. Manipulative. They have been on Earth far l
onger than people have. If you are not careful, they will outsmart you—and then they will eat you.”

  “Okay, great,” says Daniel. He looks out the window across the street at the bookstore. A feeling of dread comes over him, as if he’s just crossed some invisible line of no return. A line that melts Tromindox, apparently.

  “I’ve got some people arriving, soon,” Mrs. Woods says. “People who can help us fight back. They are on their way right now. If I can just get them here in one piece… ”

  “People?” says Daniel. “Like that fellow who visited you? With the interesting hat? That sort of people?”

  “Kind of,” Mrs. Woods says. “Agents. Well, ex-agents. Actually, a bounty hunter. And her two children.”

  Daniel looks skeptical.

  “The best bounty hunter you’ll ever see, mind you,” Mrs. Woods adds. “She can take out a Tromindox before you even know it’s there. Just the sort of person we need here. And now. We really do need her. I just hope they don’t get run off the road trying to get here.”

  Why do we need a bounty hunter in Brokeneck? “Is someone after them?”

  “A bounty hunter always has someone after her,” Mrs. Woods says. “She’s not too popular with the Tromindox, as you can imagine. If they get a good shot at her, they’ll take it. But she’s none too loved by the Council, either. Oh, they have differing opinions, but see, a while back, she and her husband, they did some unconventional things to protect their family. Interesting story, that.”

  “Protecting your family doesn’t seem too unconventional,” Daniel says.

  “Yes but this family, there are those, like some in the Council, who would like to get rid of them. And they darn near did it, too, a while back.” Mrs. Woods leans in as if to relate an important secret that no one must hear.

  Daniel listens carefully, but this story seems jumbled. Tromindox? Council? He has never heard of any of these things. It’s as if memories from his childhood have come to life and become much—bigger. He feels like he just learned that the monsters under his bed were real. And now they don’t stay under the bed anymore.