Otherworld (17 page)

“One, two, three, four, five, six …”

She counted each step, and when she got to forty-six, she heard
it
. She was not far from where she began to count. Little girls have little strides. Her bones began to quiver, vibrating in terror. She kept walking, listening to her footsteps, but they were echoed by another's. Echoed by
it
. There was a second set of footsteps behind her. She was sure of it.

She stopped. She heard nothing.

Slowly, she started out again, listening intently, and after a few steps, the crunching behind her resumed. The noise was louder than her own. Whatever was there was certainly larger than she. It was too loud to be a figment of her imagination. It was too real.

She wanted to run, but her fear paralyzed her.
If you just stay still, it will go away.
Abby kept walking, but she didn't run,
couldn't
run. She knew that if she did,
it
would run up behind her and that would be the end of that. Her entire body trembled, and her tears ceased, the ducts clogged by absolute shock.

Then the footsteps behind her stopped. Abby kept going, all the while thinking about sleeping between Mommy and Daddy, safe and secure in Mommy and Daddy's big bed from the trees and the monsters and the
it
behind her. She hoped that
it
had gone away. She stopped, and then she did something that she never thought she would have the courage to do. Slowly, cautiously, she began to turn around. She intended to look behind her, to look at the road she had traveled, and she prayed to God that she would find it empty.

Please Jesus please Jesus please Jesus
, she prayed.
Please, Jesus, don't let …

She was halfway there.

anything

She closed her eyes for a moment.

be

The turn complete, she opened them.

there!

Nothing. The path rolled on into the darkness.

She turned back and continued the stroll home.

 

In the bushes, to her right and not far behind,
it
watched her with wide-eyed intensity. A young girl. Little girl. Six, maybe seven years old. It saw that she was shivering, and it was shivering too. She had almost seen it. She must have heard it walking behind her.

Carefully, it crept along in the dark shadows of the woods, staying close to her. Tracking her. But it placed its footsteps cautiously, avoiding leaves or twigs, so as not to make a sound. It hunched over, bending its knees, and used one hand for balance. The other held a butterfly knife.

He was not sure if he had killed his mother. Everything went blurry back at the house, and the voices had been screaming so loudly in his head that his ears rang. All he knew was that he was freezing (and probably had the beginnings of frostbite on his fingers) and that he had decided to do whatever the voices said from here on out.

The girl walked very fast now. She was practically running. He scrambled along the brush, trying hard to keep up and forgetting all about stealth and silence.

Jimmy? One more favor, please.

The girl walked briskly, and he began running after her. She tried to scream, but the cold flesh of his rough hand covered her mouth, pressing tight against her teeth. He was upon her.

CHAPTER NINE

Robbie Jensen and his wife, Teri, sat at their antique breakfast table and ate dinner. Robbie gulped down the last bite of his second helping of lasagna, and the phone rang.

“Robbie. This is Mike.”

“Hey, Mike, good to hear from you. Had dinner yet? Teri made lasagna, and you can come over if you want. There's plenty left.”

“No, man. Thanks, though. Look, I need a few days off from work. Something came up, and I need to get out of town for a while.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah, I'm fine.” Mike sighed. “Molly's sister died last night.”

“Oh, man, I'm sorry.”
How exactly does one follow that?
“What happened?”

“It was a car crash, apparently. Look, Molly's not taking it too well—”

“How could she?”

“Right. Anyways, you know they grew up in foster homes—in an orphanage, for God's sake—so I'm really the only family. Molly's just too broken up. I'm gonna have to take care of the arrangements.”

“Sure, sure, Mike. I understand. No problem. No problem at all.”

“So I can have the time off?”

“Of course. Yeah, it's no problem at all, man. Is there anything I can do?”

“Well, there is one thing. Do you go to church?”

The question seemed to come out of nowhere for Robbie. “Do what?”

“Church. Do you go?”

“No. No, not really. Christmas and Easter,” he said, almost apologizing

“I'm just looking for a minister. You know, to do the service. I'd look for one in Dallas, but it'd just be eeny-meeny-miney-moe. I wouldn't know one from the other. I guess I could go with whoever the funeral home suggests, but it wouldn't be the same. Molly was going to church a lot, so I'm sure she would want a real minister doing the funeral, if you know what I mean. Somebody with a connection somehow.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. What about the church she went to here in Houston?”

“I called already. All of their staff is away at some conference for the week.”

“Well,” Robbie said, “Teri goes every now and then. Let me ask her.”

He did and returned. “She goes over to that church on Jones Road. She says the pastor's nice. Name's Steve Woodbridge. Hold on a second. Teri's getting his phone number for you.”

“Thanks, Rob. I really appreciate this.”

“Like I said, man—no problem at all.”

“Hey, Rob. You think maybe you could come up for the funeral? Molly's got no family, and some of mine will be there, but it'll look really empty. I'd really appreciate it if you could maybe come up.”

“Sure, Mike. I'll be there.”

 

Pops Dickey retired to bed, satisfied but angry. Attention from the media had kept him busy all day. Even the Houston local news showed up, though they seemed a bit unhappy to be there. A little ashamed, too. Representatives from newspapers and magazines swarmed, camera-toting moths drawn to a dying flame, and Pops figured most of them were still hanging around town after reporting the first cow's death. Waiting for further developments. Mysterious lights in the sky, maybe.

He did not feel guilty for making up his story. He knew that aliens had killed his cows, and he knew they came from outer space, and just because he didn't actually
see
them didn't mean the story wasn't true. He didn't care if the police found a tarot card in his barn. He didn't care if the second death looked entirely different from the first. Aliens had killed his cows, and he knew it.

Gertie didn't believe him, but what did she know, anyway? She hadn't seen the flying saucer.
Well, neither did I, for that matter
, he thought.
But at least I know it happened.

Pops lay alone in the bed, the quilt pulled up to his chin for warmth. Gertie got so put out by all the goings on that she went to stay at a friend's house. She had never done that before. She called Pops a “crazy old man,” and she up and left. He was alone now, nobody to believe in him. To believe his story.
Stewadell would
, he thought.
He'd stand right there beside me and tell 'em he saw the aliens with his own two eyes.
But in reality, he knew that Stewadell would probably laugh at him. Stewadell would call him crazy, just as Gertie had. They all thought he was crazy. Including Lattimer. That guy aimed to stop the show. He didn't believe in aliens or flying saucers. He believed in coyotes or teenage vandals or tarot-card readers. He wanted to stop the show.

Pops loved the spotlight. The day had satisfied him. But he hated Graham Lattimer, and underneath his sense of satisfaction ran a current of rage.

Maybe somebody will have to stop him, then, won't they?

 

Lisa Diaz clutched the dish towel to her breast tightly and peered out the window. She stood in the kitchen, which lay in the front of the house and looked out upon the street. Night fell, and she could see nothing beyond the front yard. She expected to see the headlights of the neighbor's pickup truck come blaring down the road. The expectation had turned to hope, and then to worry. Abby should have left Elizabeth's thirty-or-so minutes ago if she planned to walk, and she definitely would have arrived home by now. The walk was short. The walk was easy. Abby had walked the distance many times before, and she had never taken this long. Lisa chewed on her bottom lip and wrung the towel in her clenched fists, her knuckles turning white. She thought of her child, her little girl, walking home in the darkness. Scared and alone.
She should be home by now.
She called Melody.

“Melody, this is Lisa. Is Abby still over there?”

Melody did not answer immediately, and the hesitation ignited panic in Lisa's hands. They began to shake uncontrollably.

Finally, Melody responded: “She's not home yet?”

A chill ran through Lisa's body. Her mouth went dry. She hung up the phone without saying another word to Melody, ran to the foot of the stairs, and called up to her husband, who was watching the news in the bedroom. “Carlos! Carlos!” Her eyes began to gush with huge torrents of tears, and her lungs heaved rapidly, her sobs quickening until she hyperventilated.

Carlos came bounding down the steps. “What's wrong?”

Lisa struggled to get it out. “Abby … Abby … She left from Elizabeth's a while ago and she's not home yet … It's so dark, Carlos … Something's happened.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I'm sure she's fine. Probably stopped to look at the Baileys' horses or something. I'll go out and get her.”

He turned toward the door—but then it opened, and Abby walked in.

Lisa jumped up and rushed to her daughter, embracing her triumphantly, but she was horrified. Abby's hair was disheveled and her blouse was torn. Her knees were skinned and bleeding, and she was filthy with dirt. But there was
something
…

Something odd …

She was smiling.

“Abby!” Lisa said. “What's wrong? What happened to you?”

“It's okay, Mommy.”

“What happened to you, sweetie? Who did this to you?”

“The bad man,” Abby replied.

Her father rushed out the open door and ran into the darkness of the road in search of the monster who had attacked his little girl.

“What happened, Abby? What happened?”

“The bad man came out of the bushes and grabbed me, Mommy, but don't worry, it's okay. I'm okay. The bad man couldn't hurt me.”

“How did you get away?”

“The good man.”

“The good man?”

“The good man came and grabbed the bad man before he could hurt me. The good man took the bad man away.”

Lisa Diaz picked up her daughter and clutched her tightly to her chest. She turned back to the phone and called the police.

Outside, her husband walked up and down the street, looking for the bad man, but he never found him.

 

Taking a late-night flight to Dallas with such a foreboding thought as death in his mind aggravated Mike's already omnipresent paranoia. The fear of having to identify Vickie's body set a firm foundation for more irrational fears.
The pilot has a stroke, and the plane goes down. Lightning strikes the wing, and the plane goes down. A crazed terrorist leaps up from his seat and announces that a bomb is ticking in the cargo hold, and, of course, the plane goes down.
When you're on a plane, every imaginative scenario ends with the fiery plummet of the plane. Airplanes were not ideal environments for the nervous imaginations of men like Mike Walsh.

Stereo headphones sprouted from the arm of his seat, and he adjusted them over his ears. The classical music bubbling from Station 7 soothed him a little. He glanced across the aisle and noticed that a woman in the middle seat held the latest issue of
Spotlight Magazine
. He supposed she had read his article on UFOs already. He smiled, and his nervousness settled down a bit further.

Still, he could not help thinking of the duty awaiting him. He knew it was just a formality. Obviously, the authorities knew for a fact that the body they had on their hands was Vickie Holland. He would need only to glance at her. Perhaps he could even fake it somehow. Close his eyes quickly or look at her hair instead of her face. All they wanted from him was the assurance—the words: “Yeah, that's her.”

The thought of his chore terrified him, but not for the obvious reason. The thought of seeing the corpse did loom over him—he fixated on it—but something existed beyond fear of seeing a dead body. He had never been very close to his sister-in-law. He could say that he was sad she had passed away, and he could mourn her loss for his wife's sake, but if he was honest, she was not a personal loss to him. It was not dreadful to say that he would not miss her, because he hardly knew her. No, he did not fear Vickie's dead body. He feared what it meant. It meant confronting DEATH.

He had confronted DEATH, or rather, it had confronted
him
, a long time ago. He still had nightmares of that encounter, and now it seemed that those nightmares were slipping free from the shackles of sleep. They became conscious. They became true. They became real.

He did not fear the physical action of viewing death, but rather DEATH itself, and despite recently finding a friendship that seemed to offer hope, feelings of his own nothingness swallowed him once again. Once again, life was meaningless.

He rented a car at the Dallas airport and drove to Vickie's house. On the way, his fear spread to a wholly other situation in his life—Molly. The notion that Vickie's death would bring him and his wife closer together was fleeting. In theory, after losing her only blood relative, Molly would rush into Mike's arms and cling to him, the only family she had left. But both rational thought and his own pessimism convinced him of the converse. She would surely drift further away. He knew about the statistics showing the strains death had on personal relationships, strains that often led to separation or divorce. Heck, he'd probably written an article about it at one time or another. But their strain had already been there. They were already separated. They could only grow more apart.