Six
“Billy’s back.”
The voice cut off Evie’s breath. She hadn’t heard
the approach of the little machine. She hadn’t smelled it coming, maybe
because of wind stirring the trees outside. She had been lying curled
beneath her blankets wide awake in the night, waiting, but it had taken
her entirely by surprise.
“Can you hear me?” it said.
She was shaking like a leaf. “I can hear you.”
It sounded like a voice coming over a transistor
radio. She lifted her head and turned to face the window, trying to make
out the object squatting on her window sill. It looked like an oversized
insect, except that reflections of light from the highway gleamed along
edges of shiny metal. Fins on the back of the machine glowed a ruddy
crimson in the dark.
She could smell its heat, but it was only a machine,
not a demon from hell after all.
“Billy, is that you?” she said softly, hoping her
voice wouldn’t carry too far in the stillness of the night. It was past
midnight. Abe and Lazarus and Noah were probably asleep, but the walls of
the old house were thin.
“Billy is afraid you’ve forgotten about him since
the accident.”
Then it wasn’t Billy speaking after all. Evie buried
her face in her pillow to muffle her sobs of anguish. It had been a
living hell waiting for some word of what had happened to him, how bad he
had been hurt, and why he had never tried to contact her in all the years
they had been apart. “It wasn’t his fault!” she cried out. None of it
had been his fault. If he never wanted to see her again, how could she
blame him?
“Surely.”
She sat up in sudden agitation and turned on her
table lamp, determined to have a close look at the device before it
escaped her again. She half expected it to dart away in the light. It
stayed put this time.
At close range, the machine was far less imposing
than the unknown she had imagined. It was an obvious human construct
rather than the biological monster she had imagined. It was the sort of
thing Billy would do, build a little radio with legs through which to
speak with her rather than brave his characteristic timidity and risk a
face to face confrontation.
“It’s you,” she accused the machine. “Billy, you
can’t fool me.”
“A friend as close as a friend can get,” the
tinny voice said, “but not Billy.”
Evie knew with a sinking despair that it spoke the
truth. Though it sounded like Billy’s voice, it wasn’t saying the things
Billy would have said to her.
“You and Billy belong together,” it said.
“It was unfortunate you were separated. Billy should never have been
hurt.”
She stood with her fists clenched at her sides. “Who
are you?”
“I have known Billy since the accident.”
“What do you want?”
“Billy needs you. There is danger here.”
“Abraham won’t let anyone hurt me,” she said
defiantly, not knowing if she liked the idea of talking to a stranger who
could sneak around in the darkness with impunity, even if he was a friend
of Billy’s.
“There is more danger than you know.”
“So what do I do, just run away from my brothers?”
The voice paused before answering. “If you can.”
Evie calculated her chances of escape. Abraham had
half the town convinced that she was some helpless halfwit. “I’m afraid
to try,” she said.
“Then Billy and I will help.”
“I want to talk to Billy first.”
“That can be arranged.”
She cocked her head suspiciously, but hope flared
anew in her heart. “I want to see and talk to Billy face to face. I want
to see for myself that he’s okay.”
The machine was silent for a moment. “Then you
must come up to the house.”
Which was exactly what she dared not risk. If she
tried and failed, Abe would take away even the little freedom he allowed
her.
Fear began seeping through her fading hopes. Maybe
it wasn’t Billy up at the house at all, but someone trying to lure her up
to the old mansion for purposes far more sinister than a reunion with an
old friend.
The machine crouched suddenly. It leapt and was gone
in an instant, a fraction of an instant before a baseball bat arced
through the glass of the window from the porch outside and shattered its
rotting frame. Evie screamed and brought her covers up to protect her
face against a shower of glass fragments.
“Goddamn!”
It was Lazarus’ voice, a shriek of rage and even
terror.
“It stung me! Goddamn, it hurts!”
Abe and Noah stormed from their beds. She heard one
go out the back and the other out through the front door. Both men
demanded an explanation in a roar of anger and fear as they converged on
Lazarus standing on the porch in front of her window.
“It was a one of Evie’s demons!” Lazarus cried. “I
saw it! I tried to kill it and it stung me. Jesus, it hurts, Abe!”
Abe hit the man. She heard the sound and the
shuffling of Lazarus’ feet as he careened backwards out of control and hit
the ground.
And then there was silence, and harsh whispering.
“We can’t afford trouble now,” Abe spat at Noah. “Look around. See what
you can find. What the hell, go get a few men from the tavern to help
you. Tell them we had a prowler.”
“What about Evie?” Noah queried.
Evie quavered with terror, waiting for Abe’s
decision. “I’ll deal with Evie. Take Lazarus with you. Find out what
the hell this was all about. Lazarus, the next time I catch you outside
after dark, I’ll break your fingers, one by one, every last goddamned one
of them.”
Evie curled into a ball on her bed and lay stricken
with terror, waiting for Abe to come crashing into her room. His
footsteps pounded through the house. He smacked his fist against the door
and banged it against the wall. “Put something on that won’t get all tore
up.”
Evie put on blue jeans and one of Noah’s old shirts
that hung half way down her legs. Abe was pacing in the living room with
a flashlight clutched in one hand. “Where did you see this light of
yours?”
Evie pointed back toward her bedroom.
“I mean the other night when Lazarus caught you
outside. Where did you see it go?”
She nodded toward the back of the house. “In the
woods.”
“Show me.”
Evie took the lead, going out the back way and
retracing her steps through the back yard to the woods beyond the fence.
She pointed to the downed barbed wire around the old well barely visible
in the light that seeped through the trees from the highway. “That’s
where I fell. I saw the light up on the hill a little.”
“What the hell were you doing, following it?”
She nodded reluctantly. “It wanted me to follow.”
Abe frowned, shook his head in disgust, and swept the
flashlight along the ground. The tavern was only a block or so down the
road. She could already hear men’s voices taking to the woods in search
of prowlers.
She saw a flicker of crimson light from somewhere
ahead. “There!” she cried.
Abe lunged forward and scanned the underbrush with
unexpected urgency. “Don’t see nothing,” he muttered in frustration.
Someone cried out from no more than a few hundred
yards. “Goddamn, it stung me! Motherfucker, it hurts!”
Evie grabbed a fistful of Abe’s shirt. “There!”
Abe saw it this time, a twinkling red light moving
slowly in the dark ten or twenty yards away. His reaction puzzled her.
He stood straight up and he relaxed with a sigh. “Yeah, I got it this
time. What the hell is it?”
Evie wanted to confide in him. “It ain’t no demon,”
was all she dared say.
The confidence in her tone of voice caught his
attention. He looked down at her. “What then?”
“Some kind of little machine.”
“Billy Trevor’s toys?”
She shrugged, increasingly frightened by the notion.
“Billy played with toy airplanes and cars.”
Abe fumbled for her hand and held on tight. He half
dragged her through the trees toward voices ahead. He stopped when a
group of flashlight beams and dark figures emerged from the trees.
Evie caught sight of another red light darting
swiftly off to one side. Someone cried out in pain.
“Jesus!”
A string of obscenities followed.
“It’s shooting needles!”
Abe pulled her back against the trunk of an old oak
as three red lights zig-zagged past at a speed no man could match in the
darkness. Evie heard the whine of their little motors. They moved up the
hill, only occasionally visible through the heavier underbrush until they
disappeared completely.
“They’re getting away,” Evie said, hoping the hunt in
the darkness would now end.
A gunshot sounded in the near distance.
“Put that thing away!” Abe roared. “You damned fool,
you’ll kill someone!”
Noah and Lazarus and a few other men came stumbling
past, some drunk enough to trip in the shallow erosion ditches running
down the hill, one or two too drunk to get up without a helping hand.
“Idiots,” Abe muttered. “All right, go on back!
They’re gone!”
Voices calling through the darkness passed the word
along. Most went willingly, disgusted by the farce of drunk men panicking
over nothing. Only a few had actually seen the lights. At Abe’s urging,
they, too, turned back rather than go in pursuit alone. The injured
lagged behind, picking slivers of metal from their flesh and unable to
convince the others of the intensity of the pain they suffered.
Lazarus emerged from the darkness with tears in his
eyes. “It stung me, Abe. It hurts like hell, worse than a godblessed
wasp sting.”
“Lightning bugs,” Abe said.
Lazarus started in disbelief. “What?”
“Half of them are drunk enough to believe anything
you tell them. Quiet them down, Lazarus. Keep them the hell out of the
woods until I get this mess figured out.”
“What the hell were they, really?”
Abe ignored the question and turned away, far more
shaken by the incident than he was going to openly admit. He clutched
Evie’s hand even tighter on the way back to the house.
“What the hell were they!” Lazarus called out from
behind them.
“Trevor’s doing,” Abe muttered, turning to face Evie
in the light cast by the kitchen window. “What else could it be? It’s
got to be Billy Trevor.”
Evie shook her head, but Abe ignored her.
“As soon as he comes for you, you damn well better
let me know. Let me deal with him my own way.”
“I will,” Evie lied. “I promise.”
“It’ll be for the best for all of us.”
She nodded frantically.
He let her go. Evie rushed back to her bedroom and
tried to lock her broken door. Her anger at Abe’s stubbornness peaked in
helpless rage.
The little machines couldn’t possibly be Billy’s
doing. Billy would have been more open with her. The thing that had
spoken to her had been mysterious and unnerving.
She curled up in the middle of her bed. As soon
as he comes for you, Abe had said. “As soon as who comes for
me?” she whispered to the darkness.
