Part 10 (1/2)

Ash had just pulled herself up so that the rope was 120 tucked beneath her armpits, relieving some of the weight from her rope-burned palms, when the creature's deliberate approach became audible again.

Ash tried to remain still, although with so much give in the rope, she listed helplessly back and forth. By the time the phantom had drawn near, however, she had coaxed the rope to remain at least still enough not to bray. Now all she could do was pray that her s.h.i.+ny white tennis shoes were high enough to escape the creature's line of vision.

The phantom paused beneath her. It was toeing at the electric lantern curiously. A dark arm materialized from its inky body. Three spindly liquid fingers wrapped themselves around the handle and held it gingerly in front of its blue flame of an eye. It didn't seem too keen on touching it, as if the lantern were radioactive. A fourth finger blossomed from its hand and snaked around the lantern, caressing the gla.s.s...o...b..until the tip of the finger settled onto the plastic power b.u.t.ton.

It flipped the switch.

With a hum the battery engaged and the light flickered on. Ash retracted her knees up closer to her body, trying to pull her feet out of the lantern's radius of light, lest the metallic strips on her sneakers reflect into the beast's curious eye.

It shrank back from the light at first, startled by what to it must have seemed like a portable sun.

Its teeth parted. With a furious sound that was 121 somewhere between a squawk and a roar, it hurled the lantern at the base of the redwood with the ladder built into it. The gla.s.s...o...b..shattered and the filament burst.

The tungsten embers faded and immersed the forest once more in darkness.

The phantom lingered beneath the rope, and Ash thought for sure it must have known she was there. But the truth was far more horrifying than that, as from behind a nearby tree a second blue flame appeared, attached to the body of yet another creature.

The new arrival came toe to toe with his identical companion. The first squawked to the second, who promptly rotated its blue eye toward the debris of the pulverized lantern. The second cyclops barked something back to the first. This prompted the first to edge closer to the other until their ”skin” touched.

The two phantoms melted into one.

The amoeba-like ma.s.s of the first creature gelled together with the other, with no resistance or fight. Their gasoline flesh bubbled as one, a living oil spill. When the reverse mitosis had concluded, a single phantom twice the original size stood in the place where the two had been, with legs now thicker than telephone poles. And it had two glowing blue flames for eyes instead of one.

With a last pa.s.sing glance at the trees around it, the new phantom lumbered off in a completely new direction, quick enough for Ash to know that if it ever returned and intended to catch her, it most certainly would.

122.

Ash didn't need any persuasion. She swung hand over hand on the rope until she could grab hold of the wooden rungs. She scampered halfway down the ladder before she let go, dropping heavily to the ground. The broken gla.s.s of the lantern crackled under her feet.

She had been running for only a minute before she saw a low light emanating from the other side of the trees.

Like a moth she flocked to it and prayed it wasn't the deadly whisper of another blue flame. Ash lowered her head and barreled around the other side of the trees.

She ran right into a clearing full of people.

Perched on the head of Turtle Rock and circled around a glowing hot plate were Jackie, Darren, and a small pride of senior boys, all of whom looked equally as stunned and bewildered as Ashline.

Ash ran a hand through her disheveled hair and waited for her panting breaths to slow before she waved casually at the group. ”Um . . . hi.”

Jackie's unblinking eyes peered at her before she finally adjusted her gla.s.ses and held out a wooden rod with a marshmallow simmering on the end of it. ”S'more?”

123.

THE BEACH SCROLLS.

Satur da y Ashline woke the next morning and immediately hit her head.

She had somehow managed to not only roll off her mattress and onto the floor once again, but from there, still asleep, she'd wiggled beneath the bed frame.

The result was shooting pain in her forehead and an explosion of light in her eyes. She had vague memories of dreams involving the blue flame people. In the one that surfaced first, she had again been dangling from a rope over the forest floor, only this time there'd been a whole pack of the phantoms waiting hungrily below, like a school of blood-frenzied sharks. Finally she'd let go, and the phantoms had congealed into one enormous creature. She'd had just enough time to see its bear-trap jaws part before she slipped into its open mouth, down its moistened gullet, and into the hot furnace of a belly waiting below.

124.

After she wormed her way out from the clutter beneath her bed, she touched her sheets. They were still slick with night sweats. Looked like part of her Sat.u.r.day would now be devoted to laundry. Joy.

She had, for obvious reasons, not shared with Darren or Jackie her late-night rendezvous with the phantoms.

As far as she was concerned, the marshmallow she had eaten off the floor had been laced with hallucinogens, and until another crypto-zoological creature appeared on her doorstep, she was sticking to her theory.

She rescued her racket from her closet and headed for the courts. The pitching machine already held a full reservoir of tennis b.a.l.l.s; she had only to wheel it onto the court and into place before she flicked the on switch. Fiercely compet.i.tive at heart, Ash lived to compete against other players and, moreover, to pummel them without mercy.

But there was just something about playing against the machine that got her blood going, the way it fired relentlessly over the net with cold malice. The machine wasn't a ”better” or ”worse” player. It was an indifferent judge of intuition and guts, of what Ash had underneath the hood, and of how far she had come.

She eventually synchronized to the rhythm of the game, the hollow thuck! sound of the machine providing the ba.s.s to her morning symphony of tennis.

By the time the machine launched the last ball from its reservoir, Ash rushed the net and, with a resounding scream, struck the ball with an overhand blow. It overshot the boundary line at the back of the 125 court and hit the machine itself. The pitcher tottered on its feet.

Her aggression in check, Ash slung her tennis bag over her shoulder and hustled back to the dormitory. She had just tossed her bag into the corner and was entertaining the idea of a shower when Jackie materialized in her doorway. Her bespectacled, ravenously hungry friend dragged Ash off to the dining hall for Sat.u.r.day brunch.

”And then,” Jackie continued excitedly, reaching for the syrup, ”he said we should definitely hang out. Can you imagine? Me, dating a senior?”

”Maybe he has a thing for the mousy librarian look,”

Ash suggested between sips of her orange juice.

Jackie narrowed her eyes in a failed attempt to look threatening. ”Watch it. This is my future husband we're talking about.”

Ash pointed her fork at Jackie, as the other girl went to town drizzling the thick viscous syrup over each and every cranny of her Belgian waffle. ”I really hope you weren't drooling over Chad Matthews like that.”

In response Jackie dipped her finger into the syrup and, before Ash could shy away, drew a line of goop down Ashline's forearm.

Ash squealed with disgust. ”You little b.i.t.c.h!” She dabbed frantically at her arm with a napkin.

Jackie winked at her and took a bite of her waffle without even cutting it. ”Next time,” she said with her mouth full, ”it'll be your face.”

126.

Grateful that the one-sided tennis match had restored her appet.i.te, Ash returned to the buffet line for seconds.

On the way she pa.s.sed the table with Rolfe, Ade, and Lily. The trio and Ash exchanged nods that seemed to say, Yes, Thursday night really happened. Yes, we're still here.

And yes, we'll be paying for it at tomorrow's detention.

Ash had just reached the front of the food line when she caught sight of the blue-flamed gas burners that heated the brunch trays. Her appet.i.te atrophied.

The sun reared its head not long after brunch. Ashline donned a halter top and shorts, and along with Darren and Jackie grabbed a beach towel and joined a ma.s.s of other students on the Blackwood quad. For the major-ity of the afternoon she lazed about in soporific content-ment, alternating between lying on her back and her belly as if she were a flapjack. When it became clear that attempting her viral marketing reading for econ cla.s.s was a fool's errand, she spent the rest of her outdoor time idly scrolling through the tracks of her MP3 player and occasionally adjusting her aviator sungla.s.ses.

But all good things had to come to an end. As Jackie, who had lathered her pasty body in self-tanner, was trying to convince Ash to parade past the senior boys'

pickup volleyball game, the clouds rolled across the sky with a cautionary grumble. Within minutes the bipolar weather had taken a turn for the worse, and the drizzle began to come down.