Part 6 (2/2)

Industry, that's all it was--empty and echoless and inhabited by minds as flat as those of store mannequins.

Urbanized industrial rich. No sun. No night. No inspiration. He realized with something close to panic that he was stuck in the middle of the very f.u.c.king thing he'd once looked upon as a parentless child and abhorred.

It was no wonder he could no longer paint. How the h.e.l.l had this happened? ”Mister Alek...wait up!” called Eustace as he came loping up the street and took him by the arm. ”Where're you going, Mister Alek?”

”An errand.”

”Can I come?”

”No.”

”Please?”

”No.”

”I'll be real quiet, I pr--”

”No! I said no! Are you on stupid pills?”

Eustace jerked. His eyes were young and afraid.

f.u.c.king lunatic, what had he done? Alek reached out, carefully, and gathered the boy under his arm. This was no good. What was wrong with him? What the h.e.l.l was going on? ”I'm sorry, son,” he said. ”I--”

He paused. He felt it first in his back, and then a rush in his neck and jaw. Something coming their way.

Down that alley across from them. He looked at Eustace. Eustace only looked back. He was innocent. No blood there. He and Book would be getting together pretty soon, but Alek didn't think he needed to ask how it had gone the other night. Dairy Queen, obviously.

”Wait here,” he said and crossed the street to where a pair of crumbling tenement buildings stood side by side, so close their ornate stone cornices nearly necked.

Dark here. While waiting for his eyes to adjust he drew his katana, brought it up under his forearm into the ready-strike position. Paranoia? But of course. Vampires were especially capable of vendettas. He felt for the presence with his mind, sensed its retreat. Oh no you don't, he thought. You're following me and I'm just in the mood for you tonight!

He stepped into the alley, felt the presence retreat all the way to the back. Useless. This alley, like the majority of the Village alleys, were flat dead ends. He sidled against one wall and stalked the creature slow, his feet making no sound on the dirty asphalt. Deftly he avoided the stacked boxes and mounds of refuse scattered down the throat of the alley. A rat scrabbled loose from one mound of garbage and skittered between his feet to reach the next. He ignored it. His eyes narrowed, crawled over the darkness and the rearing graffiti-covered city walls.

There. A shadow fluttered like a wing not a hundred feet ahead and a little to his right. He stopped, gauging its size and speed. Small. Childlike. Christ, but he hated doing the kids.

A pair of catlike eyes studied him out of a pocket of utter darkness, red and reflective.

”Who are you?” he said, swinging his sword overhead. ”Speak, and I might not tear you apart.”

He was about to corner it when it did the unexpected and strode gallantly forward like a priestess cloaked in awry shadows. He did not move, did not react. The sword and his arm were suddenly disconnected for the first time in his li fe.

His instinct, for either flight or fight, was gone. His breath was gone. The alley of which he'd been the expert on only a moment ago whirled around him in a lightless tempest. Bosch. Bad melee of studies in half-light.

From somewhere on the avenue came the severe throb of music. Rhapsody of my heart, he thought.

But then everything grew still and devoutly quiet before the phantomlike figure floating toward him, the face the finely chiseled chinabone craftswork of a doll, the hair frayed black flamelike silk, the mouth red, the eyes red, Snow White, Rose Red.

Alek's mouth rasped open over no words and no voice. He dropped his sword; then he himself dropped to his knees.

Debra had returned at last and she was going to kill him.

8 His earliest memory was of a pallid room, the last in a long line of pallid rooms which came to be his and his sister's prison for the first eight years of their lives. The dormrooms of McEnroy Home slept four apiece and in each corner of each room was an iron-framed bed with a white chenille spread and white pillows. Drapes and valences were colorless and s.e.xless and the air of the Home smelled perpetually of cold hospital antiseptics. And then there was Ms. Bessell, the dorm mistress, and in his earliest memory she was scolding some kid--his name was Louis or Lenny or something--because he had gotten a b.l.o.o.d.y nose from picking it and there was blood on the white laundered spread now and the blood was bright and warm and fascinating to Alek, a single island of life in the midst of the apocalypse of seamless whiteness.

These were the things he remembered first, the things that stood out farthest in the most distant part of his mind.

It was said that it was the Home cook who'd found them, he and his sister, swaddled in newspaper and cradled in a cardboard box on the back stoop of the Home under the eaves. No note or keepsake, so went the legend, only themselves, waxen foreheads touching, their faces androgynous and similar. The eleventh set of twins forced upon the Home that year, the social worker in charge of their case scratched the surname Knight on their records in true d.i.c.kensian tradition and yanked their given names, Alek and Debra, from the skin rag hidden in the pencil drawer of his desk. After that, he handled them in terms of paper only.

It was Cook, a big dark woman with a great laugh and the fearsome habit of smoking lavender cigars, who saw to it that the twins were not separated and placed with their own s.e.x. And in time they came to occupy their own room exclusively, though Cook had little to do with that. The year was 1950 and though postwar America was prospering from oversea's fortunes and Ipana toothpaste ads were telling the baby boomers that in America no child had so bright a future, twins were still especially difficult to place and it wasn't expected they would be. So this token by McEnroy Home was like a consultation prize.

But it was more than that. Cook knew it; they all did.

The twins were special. Magic, some said. Some said things about the twins, wondrous and strange things, things which scarcely deserved imagining. They learned all their lessons quickly because they were clever, and they made everyone think of them as thoughtful because they were. But there was a subconscious degree of separation that no one in the Home seemed able to measure or rightly label. They were almost never seen apart, and their soft, silent looks weighed things between them constantly. But of course to the other children who could not hear their thoughts they were a mystery. They did not exchange secrets in the showers, did not pa.s.s or receive notes during cla.s.s, did not join any of the playground cliches that grew and constantly reformed. And the torment the older Home children wrought upon the younger--the books knocked from desks, the legs outstretched In aisles, the pillowcases full of shaving cream, the braids knotted and dunked in school ink--these things somehow pa.s.sed them by completely. Cook called them her little blackbirds because of their clever obstinate eyes and soot-black lashes and their habit of perching on the breadboard and waiting patiently whenever she was putting in the gingerbread, and the name stuck as names will, but the name carried with it no stigmas, no disgrace.

Alek and Debra Knight came to accept their innate separation at least as quickly as the other children did.

And as the years pushed them gently but insistently out of infancy and into adolescence and their magic and reputation grew and the world changed around them from one of security and domestic bliss to a globe of cold war uncertainty and minority suspicion, they found little changed within the microcosm of the Home.

Kids got big and got into fights and sometimes kids died, or were adopted and went off into mysterious corners of the city, never to be seen again. But the two porcelain-faced beauties of McEnroy Home remained year after year and found with time that while the others who remained were always nice to them and quick to praise them and sought to be near them and eat with them and talk to them and considered them lucky to be with, none chose to be their friend, for the children were afraid.

Wilma Bessell: Bessell the b.i.t.c.h.

She was a big muscled women, strong and pale as chalk as if the sun had never touched her flesh in her whole lifetime. She smiled avidly at the children and whistled softly, constantly, as she wandered down the asylumlike halls of the Home with her open notebook and busy pen. Her eyes were tiny, clever, always bright and full of a mysterious and bottomless glee. A solid woman, she made the children on her floor--the twins' floor--hug her each night before bed. Hateful thing: hugging Ms. Bessell was like hugging a rolled-up mattress drenched in Chanel No. 5. And when she wasn't walking or whistling or otherwise driving kids crazy, she could usually be found reading old books of immense size on a bench on the playground tarmac, her back to the brick wall of the Home so he could watch the children play. The covers of the books she read were always black and faded gold, covered with long, overcomplicated t.i.tles.

Ms. Bessell came to work at the Home when the twins were six, and almost from the beginning they sensed her demure, sometimes suspicious eyes crawling to find them on the playground, in the halls and gameroom, in cla.s.s through the wire mesh panes of the cla.s.sroom door.

No one else seemed to notice. No one but Cook who snarled when Debra said something about it, Cook who called Ms. Bessell a ”hoe-beech” and slammed the door of the old iron oven with a clang of utter authority.

Debra smiled and went about repeating the word to everyone insistently--at least until she slipped and used the word on the woman herself and got solitary confinement for not naming her source of origin for that one.

Yet not two days later Alek felt those eyes on himself and his twin and became first annoyed with it, and then afraid.

Alek, what is it? Debra demanded to know.

Don't look. She's watching us. Again.

The b.i.t.c.h? Debra's hand never faltered as she copied the lesson from out of their reader. Stepping Stones, the book was called, and there was a happy green pond frog on the cover that Alek had always liked, had drawn many times. They did the speaking in the back of their minds usually, where they could keep it going and use the rest for their work. Dumb hoe-beech is always watching, Alek, Debra said and turned a page of the book.

The frog on Alek's book smiled up at him, but now it seemed horrible and open-mouthed to him. Sinister.

As if it would begin to speak at any moment and say things he neither understood nor wanted to hear from it. I know, he answered her. I hate her. Cook says she ain't for real.

How?

Alek shrugged, only believing Cook because she was nice and always spoke softly to Debra and sneaked them treats after dark when the kitchen was closed and no one was looking. Cook had said those very same words that very morning when she found out about Debra's confinement--She ain't fer real, chile. You best beware the beech, you hear, little bird?. And Alek had nodded dutifully even as Cook grunted and smiled through her bulldog face and wiped the raspberry stain off his face from the tart she had given him.

Maybe she's got an awful monster inside her chewing her all up inside, Debra suggested and it was just like her. You know? Like in Thriller Theatre?

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