Wings to the Kingdom Page 29

Page 29

 

  He started another crazed dash and collided with another tree, falling this time. He scooped himself up, forced his legs to rise beneath him, and hauled the light around to lead him.

  The unnatural wind and humming breath buffeted Pete still, blowing him onward and forward. The light was almost less than useless to him, but he wielded it like a weapon, since he had no other.

  The green eyes followed—from behind, from the left, and from the right.

  “Get away from me!”

  Pete thrust his hands in front of him, not wanting to make hasty friends with another tree. His wrists and fingers battered against wood, and his feet tripped over every obstacle before him. But every glance over his swelling shoulder reminded him why he ran.

  Waving his hands and the light, he ran on; and after a few minutes it occurred to him that he really was running—straight and unhindered. He’d left the forest. He’d run clear.

  He’d been herded clear.

  His shoes were slapping against a paved surface before he realized that fact. His toes were catching on the asphalt before he knew he’d been manipulated.

  Pete fell, catching himself on his hands and one knee. The duffel bag, which latched at the top, flew open, and the metal detector slid forward, knocking him in the head. He slung an arm around to stuff it back in, but an enormous hand wrapped itself around his forearm.

  Whoever the hand belonged to was inhumanly strong.

  With a flick of a mighty wrist, Pete found himself back down on the ground. His light rolled away, tipping off the side of the road and into a shallow ditch. He cringed then, and cowered, embracing the oversized bag and trying to stuff the detector and shovel back into place.

  “Leave me alone,” he whimpered. “Leave me alone!”

  Leave us alone.

  Not exactly an echo that time, the three words were tossed back at him. The speaker, or whisperer, stood tremendously tall over Pete’s crouching form. Between the hour and the fog, Pete couldn’t make out any details save the glimmering eyes that shone like an animal’s.

  The brute was huge and wide, and his form seemed unstable or uncertain. As Pete stared, he thought that the reason might be a long jacket or cape hanging down around the thing’s shoulders. It was hard to tell.

  Leave us alone, it repeated. Go, and do not return.

  “What…what are you?”

  Green Eyes—for what else could Pete call it?—leaned down closer, stepping within an arm’s reach.

  I am the Sentry. And I know what you are.

  The voice was so strange and so darkly soft that Pete wasn’t certain how he was hearing it. It might have been breathed, it was so quiet; but it may have been growled, it was so thick.

  You will not dig here. You will let them rest. Come to this place again, and I will kill you.

  Though he was relieved to infer that no killing would take place on this particular occasion, Pete was still on the asphalt, hiding behind his bag.

  “Why?” he asked, but Green Eyes had turned, and the smoldering eyes were no longer to be seen—just the mighty creature’s retreating shoulders, heaving in time to his footsteps as he slipped through the shadows.

  You know why. It’s the old pact.

  12

  Visiting Unannounced

  I had plenty of time to kill before Benny’d be off work, so on a whim I wandered back to Greyfriar’s to get coffee and a newspaper. I’d need to go back up the mountain to nab one of Dave’s cameras, but I had eight hours to run that errand; so I picked a quiet corner, back down the brick-lined hall towards the roasting room, and there I called Malachi.

  I wanted to ask him for a few details on his friend in the Bend, Kitty. He’d said she had been rambling about “the Hairy Man” and had been moved over to solitary. If I could get in and talk to her, she might be able to tell me more about the Bend’s elusive visitor.

  I didn’t know how it worked there. I wondered if you could just walk up and ask to see a patient or if it was more like jail, where you need to be on an approved list and can only show up at certain times.

  Malachi could have told me, but the one time I wanted to talk to him, he wasn’t home.

  I hung up and fiddled with my phone. Like Lu always said, it never hurt to ask—but I didn’t even know this woman’s last name. And the more I thought about it, the less certain I was that I knew her proper first name either. Who names a kid “Kitty,” anyway? I hoped for her sake that it was a nickname.

  I pulled my mini-notebook out of my bag and flipped it open on the marble-top bistro table beside my coffee cup.

  What did I know about the woman, anyway? She’d killed her sister’s kids. Two kids? I went ahead and wrote that down, though I wasn’t positive I’d remembered correctly. Her name or nickname was Kitty. She’d been remanded to Moccasin Bend, presumably for life. This probably meant that the crime had taken place in Tennessee somewhere.

  Was this enough to turn up a news story if I ran an Internet search?

  Possibly. But possibly not.

  My coffee needed refreshing, so I went over to the air pots and selected the shade-grown Nicaraguan. Beside the swiveling plastic condiments tray, someone had abandoned a local free magazine.

  I picked it up and took it back to my table, idly flipping through it while I sipped at the South American brew.

  Page three hosted an article I couldn’t skip, a page of accumulated anecdotes about the battlefield. Sensationalistic or not, I decided I could write up my trash reading to research. Most of the stories were a paragraph or less, and many of them involved silly showdowns or outrageous chases.

  Four of them I paid attention to. I recognized the themes, and they had an understated ring of truth. Quiet ghosts, pointing arms. All in all, not terribly informative. The quick tales told me nothing I didn’t already know. The ghosts wanted to communicate, but they weren’t sure how to go about doing so. Well, we’d see if we could help them with that problem tonight.

  I checked my watch. It wasn’t even suppertime.

  I closed the magazine and downed the last of my coffee. The library was only a few blocks away, and I couldn’t think of anything better to do; so I tossed my bag over my shoulder and began to walk. It was an unseasonably nice day, after all—not too hot, not too humid. Plenty of sun, and just enough shade to break up the glare.

  The farther you walk away from the river, the emptier downtown looks. Most of the storefronts are a hundred years old or more, and on some blocks fewer than one in four is occupied. But if you keep going past the emptiness, the longer you walk, the brighter the buildings get—at least in patches. Between the stretches of nothing, the odd bank building gleams, and once you get down to the TVA headquarters, the place looks positively civilized again.

  Across the street from the library something new was going up where once there had been a parking lot. Construction had eaten a lane on all four sides of the block, and street parking wasn’t what it used to be.

  I passed a pair of older men relaxing on the concrete stairs and entered the ugly old building via the squeaky glass door. I parked myself in front of an available monitor, which I luckily didn’t have to clear any porn off of before starting, and began my surfing in earnest.

  A few quick searches turned up a handful of old news stories, but nothing that sounded like a promising match for Malachi’s friend.

  I tried again, adding the words “Moccasin Bend” to the mix, but again I struck out. A few more combinations led me to someone’s blog, and after scanning a few paragraphs I learned that the author was a volunteer at the Bend.

  A candy striper in a psych ward? I kept reading but didn’t learn much more. She filed paperwork and managed activities, occasionally handing out mail or meds. It didn’t sound too complicated, but I wasn’t sure how she’d gone about getting this volunteer position.

  Maybe I could go on out there and ask. B
enny wouldn’t be off work until midnight, and Jamie wouldn’t be meeting me until after his date ended—around eleven if he was lucky, around nine-thirty if she was smart.

  I checked my watch again. I had time.

  I logged off the computer and left the library, happily forming a new plan.

  Once I’d tracked down Moccasin Bend in the middle of the night, it was much easier to find the place in broad daylight.

  My second impression of the Bend was no better than my first, the sun didn’t do anything at all to improve the premises. Everything was still white and cold in the shadow of the mountain.

  The buildings made a perfect ugly box at the end of the thumb-shaped peninsula, each one more or less the same. The compound looked like a neurotic collage of toy blocks, with all of the sharp edges but none of the color or charm. I drove between them slowly, looking up at every building front for clues as to how I might go about getting inside.

  The visitors’ parking lot seemed like a good starting point.

  I pulled in and settled the Death Nugget into a space, then left it for the nearest and most promising-looking administrative building.

  Inside, the floors were intermittently shiny, due to a half-assed wax job on wide, dirty tiles; and the russet orange Naugahyde waiting area chairs were older than I was. A variety of uniformed personnel darted through the main room and through a pair of double doors. Behind a window in the wall an old attendant with a gray bouffant hairdo looked up at me, clearly wondering who I might be and what I might want.

  I nodded a greeting. She nodded back, and returned her attention to the computer monitor in front of her.

  There was a clipboard on the window shelf, and it clearly held a stack of sign-in sheets for comers and goers. I perused it for information and inspiration. “Can I help you, darlin’?” the attendant asked.

  “I’m here to volunteer,” I said.

  She brightened, then, looking up from the computer monitor as if all might have suddenly become clear. “Oh, you’re here with the church? The outreach program, I mean?”

  “Yes,” I lied, because it was easy. My original plan had been to show up and see what becoming a volunteer involved, but if I could skip that step and fib my way in, so much the better. “I’m here with Kitty’s old church,” I continued, riding the tall tale along its logical track.