Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant (32 page)

I kept my eyes forward. Seeing a whole bunch of random people on the street all with their heads turned, staring at me and Chrissy, would have been more than I could have handled. It would have been like something out of
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
, a film I’d caught on TV the previous year that had given me nightmares. I shivered. My mouth was dry. No one was coming to the door.

I tugged Chrissy’s sleeve and she followed me round the side of the house. We paused at the living-room window. Pete’s mom and dad sat sleeping on the couch. The TV was on and so were all the lights, even though there were still hours to go before the sun dipped. We moved on without saying anything, all the way round the house to the back, to Pete’s window. We peered in.

Pete sat in the middle of the floor, legs splayed in front of him and shoulders hunched. His head was down. Eyes closed. There was something above him. Something that flickered, like heat rising off asphalt. It made my head hurt to look at it. Every few seconds, it became almost solid, and that solid form was a man, leaning down with his hands grasping Pete’s head.

Chrissy made a sound, halfway between a gasp and a whimper, and the next time the form flickered into view the man was looking straight at us.

We both cried out, stumbled back from the window, and bolted for the street. We had just reached the path when Pete’s front door opened and his mom stepped out.

“Well, hello there,” she said brightly.

We faltered in our escape, came to an awkward, stilted stop.

“Pete’s in his room,” Pete’s mom said, standing aside. “Come on in. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

We should have run. I knew we should have run. Every instinct in my body was telling me to run, to get out of there. But instead we bowed our heads, the both of us, and walked dutifully into the house. The door shut behind us.

“Pete,” Pete’s mom called, “your friends are here!” She smiled at us. “You’re so good to come by,” she said. “He hasn’t been feeling well lately.”

Then she turned, went to the couch, and sat down beside her husband. Instantly, her chin dropped to her chest, and she was back asleep.

“Hey, guys,” Pete said as he passed us on his way to the kitchen.

Chrissy and I looked at each other, then we followed him in. He stood with his back to us, looking at the fridge.

“Come to see how I’m doing, eh?” he asked.

“You haven’t been in school,” said Chrissy. Her voice sounded weirdly thick.

“No, I haven’t,” said Pete. After another moment, he opened the fridge door. “I’ve been feeling under the weather. I’m getting better now, though. Would either of you like a juice box?”

“No thank you,” said Chrissy.

“No thanks,” I said.

“I’m going to have one,” said Pete, and he took out a juice box, closed the fridge, and turned. “Have you been getting much homework?”

Chrissy didn’t answer. She probably figured it was my turn.

“Not really,” I said. “What’s been wrong with you?”

“I’ve been under the weather.”

“The flu?”

“Just under the weather.”

“Pete,” said Chrissy, “does it have anything to do with what happened at Bubba Moon’s house?”

Pete looked at her, looked at us both, and then down at his juice box. A moment passed. His right hand trembled. I was reminded of my grandpa, who’d had Parkinson’s, which made his hands shake constantly. It got so bad he couldn’t even take his own pills without spilling them all over the floor.

Then Pete’s tremble passed, and he opened the juice box with ease and took a long, slow drink. When he was done, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, burped, and grinned like a little kid. “Sorry, Chrissy, what did you say?”

“Nothing,” I said before Chrissy could repeat her question. “We just called by, to make sure you’re OK. So you’re OK, you’re doing fine, and that’s good. We have to go now.”

Pete’s face fell, almost comically. “Already? But you just got here!”

“We have to go,” I said again.

“Yeah,” said Chrissy. “My mom’s waiting in the car outside.”

Pete frowned. “But you walked here.”

Chrissy was moving back, but I froze. “How did you know?” I asked, and he looked at me. When he locked eyes with me, I could see that haze again, just over his head, and the flickering image of the man looming over his shoulder.

My thoughts slowed and a weight pressed down on my mind like a thick, heavy blanket, smothering the sharp edges, deadening the sharp voices, darkening everything and bringing it all to a slow and lethargic crawl. My eyelids lowered. My strength drained. My energy sank from my body, to my feet, and out across the floor. A yearning for rest filled me, like too much food at Thanksgiving, and I yawned, such a big yawn, and my head nodded forward with such a slow and gentle—

Chrissy yanked on my arm, pulling me out from under that blanket, and strength and fright surged through me, and before I knew it I was following her out of the house, up the path. The people on the street swung their heads towards us.

I pushed Chrissy and we ran.

There was a shout and I glanced back and they were chasing, all those people, running after us. They were bigger and stronger and faster, they were full-grown adults, and in a flat-out race they were going to catch us. I grabbed Chrissy’s hand, pulled her off the street again, trampling the flowers in some nice old lady’s front lawn. We ran into her back yard, jumped and scrambled over the fence, landed in a garden, and sprinted for the street beyond the house. There was a loud crack and we both looked back to see the wooden fence explode, a man running through the gap.

Still gripping Chrissy’s hand, I took a short cut through the narrow alley that led to the rear of the parking lot at the Green Fields Mall. We hopped over the low wall, dropped the two metres to the ground on the other side, and ran on across the sparse lot. This time of day, most people would be parking out front. We needed to get to a populated area. They wouldn’t do anything in a populated area. I hoped.

Chrissy looked back, gave a cry. I didn’t need to look. I knew they were behind us. I knew they were gaining. I also knew we only needed a few more moments and then we’d be safe.

We ran up to the rear doors of the mall, which slid open much too slowly for my liking. I squeezed through the gap, dragging Chrissy after me, ran up the steps, and we burst through an invisible barrier into a bubble of safety. Suddenly we were surrounded by people – mothers and kids and teenagers and fathers and businessmen and working women and shops and stalls and muzak and people handing out pamphlets and people collecting for charities – and we slowed to a fast walk and got into the middle of them all.

Only then did I turn, only then did I look back at the ones chasing us. They stood at the edge of this imagined bubble of mine, their eyes on me and Chrissy, cheated out of their prey. Slowly, they drifted back, until we lost them in the crowd.

I was still trying to get my breathing under control, but Chrissy was fitter than me, and already looking around for help. She spotted a mall cop and squeezed my arm. We hurried over. He stood on the periphery of the Food Court, thumbs hooked into his belt. He looked bored and unimpressive, but he was a mall cop with a walkie-talkie, and a mall cop with a walkie-talkie could get real cops over here in two minutes flat.

Right before we left the forest of people, literally two steps before we emerged into the empty space in front of the mall cop, Chrissy pulled me to a sudden stop.

The mall cop said something into his walkie-talkie. He chuckled at the response. A thought, completely unconnected to the danger we’d found ourselves in, floated to the surface of my mind like a stray balloon that had lost its tether. I wondered if mall cops, or anyone who used a walkie-talkie for that matter, had to undergo specialised training in order to understand what anyone else was saying on those walkie-talkies. Every time I passed one and it gurgled to life, all I heard was a confusing mess of abrupt sounds and crackle.

The thought went away when I caught sight of the man standing behind the mall cop. He looked straight at us and smiled. To his left stood a woman, also with her eyes fixed on us. Another man walked by, nodded good-naturedly to the mall cop, who nodded back, and then he smiled at us and lifted his shirt slightly. We saw the knife in his waistband, and backed off.

At the very centre of the Green Fields Mall there was an area of recessed seating. Chrissy and I sat there for an hour, huddled together but not speaking. A neighbour of Chrissy’s passed, saw us sitting there and made a teasing comment about me being Chrissy’s new boyfriend. Despite everything, I blushed. Chrissy’s neighbour asked her if she’d like a lift home. Chrissy looked at me, desperate to say yes, but reluctant to leave me. I told her to go on, I’d be fine.

And I was fine. I walked home quickly, leaving the mall amid a mass exodus of shoppers. I didn’t see any of the people who’d been chasing us. Nobody followed me – at least that I was aware of. I got home and everything was normal, and my dad got back from work and we had dinner and I watched
Airwolf
and then
Knight Rider
, and I didn’t say a single word about what had happened.

The threat was clear.
You talk to the mall cop, and he dies.
And it hadn’t just been a threat to mall cops. Somehow I knew it was a threat to anyone I might go to for help.

I didn’t sleep that night. Chrissy told me later that she didn’t, either.

I spent the weekend in my house, refusing to leave my bedroom for the most part. I tried doing my homework, I tried reading. I dreaded Monday morning. What if Pete was back in school? What if I walked into class and he was there, sitting in his usual seat, with the flickering image of that man looming over him?

Monday came, though, and Pete’s seat remained empty. It was empty for the rest of that week, and the week after. Then came the news that Pete’s folks had pulled him out of school. Everyone came to me and asked what had happened, what was wrong with my friend, but I just shrugged and told them I hadn’t been speaking to him. Eventually, they stopped asking.

Four months after that, I woke up one night to my name being called outside my window. I got out of bed, parted the curtains. There was a sliver of moon in the cloudy sky that barely lit anything in my backyard, but I could see Pete’s face, pale and smiling up at me.

He called my name softly, and I heard him giggle. Then the clouds covered the moon, and when the moon came back Pete was gone.

I went back to bed and I didn’t sleep that night, either.

left home when I was eighteen, glad to see the back of the place, glad to leave all those bad memories behind. By then, of course, my selective memory had long since sorted through it all and thrown out the more outlandish elements of what had happened. The version of the truth it left me with was a lot more palatable to a reasonable mind such as mine.

In this new version, elegant in its simplicity and carefully censored to protect the innocent, me and my friends had broken into this creepy old house when we were kids and we’d scared each other witless. A few days later, I went for a walk with a pretty girl to see my sick buddy, then ended up getting chased over fences by irate neighbours after we trampled some flowers. This revised version of events didn’t feature the flickering figure or the subtle threats and it made absolutely no mention of Bubba Moon, and that was OK by me.

I went to college in NYU and studied hard. I guess I knew that dropping out or failing would mean an inevitable return to my hometown, and I had no intention of going back there any time soon.

In my second year in New York, I met a girl in the library. She was surrounded by coursework and weighty tomes, and I glimpsed the lurid cover of a Gordon Edgley paperback peeking out from behind a textbook. I sat opposite, threatened to expose her for the fraud she was if she didn’t agree to have a coffee with me. I’d never been that forward before, but there was something about her, something about the way her attention was completely and utterly focused on the horror story in her hands, that made her irresistible to a bookworm like me.

She gave me a smile that only hinted at her mischievous nature, and five years later we were married. Two years after that we had our first kid. Three years after that, our second. I got a good job in a bank and Felicity stayed at home and took care of the kids, and for a nice long while life was sweet.