CHAPTER FOUR
CORNERED!
I’d heard that same whispering six months ago in the cave when I’d touched the glowing green gem and been dragged across the universe to Waar—a thousand voices all babbling to me in a language I didn’t understand—downloading it into me. That’s what the teleporter gem did. It took you to Waar and taught you the language. If I was hearing it….
I looked around, eyes wide. There was a gem around here! There had to be! That noise couldn’t be anything else!
I took a step toward the house. The voices got a tiny bit louder. Was it inside the house or behind it? I stepped off the porch and started around to the drive. It got louder still, like bees buzzing inside my head. I frowned. Did Kline’s granddaughter hear this all the time? How did she stand it? I woulda been climbing the walls. But maybe she didn’t hear it. Maybe I only heard it because I’d touched a gem before. Maybe I was attuned to it now or something.
I stepped into the backyard and started toward the back fence. The whispering got softer. Okay. In the house, then. I turned around and saw the old lady through the kitchen window, on the phone, and staring right at me. Her voice came muffled through the closed windows.
“I’m calling the police!”
I waved my hands and started for the kitchen door. “Don’t! Please! It’s here! I can sense it! It’s in your house!”
Yeah, I am aware how crazy that sounded. I was crazy. It was so close. I had to get to it. I had to find it.
Leigh shrank back as I ran up her back steps and rattled the kitchen door. She was crying into the phone. “Yes, Holliston Street! Hurry! She’s trying to break into the house!”
“I’m not trying to break in, Mrs. Gardner. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want you to open the door. I know the transmigration ray is in your house.”
Leigh hung up the phone and backed through a door, out of sight. “I—I have a gun!”
I didn’t believe her. I banged on the door. “Mrs. Gardner! Open the door! Please! Just let me talk to you.”
Nothing but whimpering. Goddamn it! There was no time for this. The cops were coming. I had to be gone before they came, and I would be if I could just find that gem!
“Mrs. Gardner! Are you there? Can you just—”
Right there in mid-sentence, my patience ran out. It was there one second, gone the next, like a drop of water on a hot skillet. I saw red. I snarled. I put my fist through the back door window, then cleared the shards with a couple more punches and reached down to the latch. A second later I was in, knuckles and arm bleeding.
I heard a scream from the living room.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Gardner. I’m just going to look for the transmigration ray now.”
I stepped into the dining room, dripping blood off my knuckles. The whispering got fainter. I backed out and crossed to the door to the living room.
BLAM!
I jerked back as a bullet splintered the door frame beside my head. The silly bitch did have a gun! A fucking Dirty Harry magnum revolver, of all things. Fortunately, firing it had knocked her on her ass, and she was heels-up across an occasional table with her head in a dish of butter mints, her forehead turning purple where the recoil had smacked her in the face.
I jumped across the room and snatched the howitzer out of her hand before she could recover.
She threw her arms over her face. “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!”
I flipped out the barrel and shook out the five remaining bullets onto the carpet. “I told you I wasn’t going to kill you. Now, stay put!”
I stuffed the gun in the back of my jeans and stood stock still, trying to listen past the pain in my arm and hand and find the whispering again. My ears were still ringing from the gunshot. It took a while. Leigh looked up at me like I was crazy. Well, duh.
After another minute I could hear it again, and it felt like it was stronger above me. I ran for the stairs.
Leigh whimpered from the floor. “Where are you going?”
“Out of your life, I hope.”
I heard sirens as I reached the second floor, and not too far away, either. Shit! The cops must have had a cruiser in the neighborhood. I didn’t have much time.
There were bedrooms to the right and left, with a bathroom and a closed door in between. The whispering was definitely louder up here. I ducked into the left bedroom, Leigh’s by the slippers under the bed and the curler set on the vanity. The whispering got quieter. I backed out and went into the other, a guest bedroom—neat as a pin. Quieter here too. Damn. The bathroom didn’t give me any love either. What was behind door number two?
I threw it open, expecting a linen closet, but it was a set of stairs going up. The attic! Of course!
I bounded up the stairs, and nearly cracked my skull. The attic was an L-shaped space with a slanting bare-beamed ceiling coming to a point only a few inches over my head. I hunched down and looked around, then groaned. The place was packed with junk! Hat boxes, trucks, crates, piles of old magazines, clothes bags hanging from a rod, an ancient baby buggy. And the sirens were only blocks away. I was never going to find the gem in time!
It was almost impossible to stop myself from tearing into the boxes at random, but that wouldn’t get me anywhere. I needed to clear my head and listen. I stopped, heart pounding, and closed my eyes. Right. It was to the right. I turned to the long leg of the L and squeezed down the narrow path between mounds of junk. The whispering got louder. I was on the right track.
I slipped around the rectangular brick pillar of a chimney and pushed to the far wall, which had a little window in it. The whispering was behind me now. I’d passed it. As I turned back, a flash of red and blue out the window caught my eye. The cops were outside. They were getting out of their car.
“Fucking cops. It’s goddamn deja-vu all over again!”
I forced myself to go ahead slowly, feeling for the moment when the source of the whispering slipped behind me. Just past the chimney, it did. I turned and looked around. There were suitcases piled up all around it. I started tearing into them like a crazed badger, dumping out dusty clothes, old letters, silverware sets, diplomas, and throwing the luggage behind me. Nothing.
As I stomped open another case I heard a knock on the front door downstairs, and Leigh wailing, “She’s upstairs! And she has a gun!”
She was answered by reassuring cop murmurs and the squawk of cop radios.
I flipped over the case, spilling it. Checkers, chess pieces and Monopoly money. I tore open another one. Postcards and souvenir spoons. I kicked it aside and spun around. I’d cleared all the suitcases around the chimney and it wasn’t in any of them, and the whispering was going crazy now, like the last act of an opera. My whole head was ringing, and I was hearing creaks and squeaks as the cops tip-toed up to the second floor. Where the fuck was it! Under the fucking floorboards?
I leaned against the chimney and mopped my forehead with the sleeve of my hoodie, catching my breath and wondering how I was going to tear up heavy wooden planks. I froze. The singing was right here! It was drowning everything out. I stepped back and stared at the chimney.
“Norman Prescott Kline, you sneaky son-of-a-bitch.”
I looked around for something heavy. There were a pair of greenish bronze statues of big-boned gals in long robes looking toward heaven and holding up laurel wreaths. I grabbed one under the tits and swung her at the chimney. She was sturdy and her base was marble. It did some damage.
I spit out brick dust and grinned. I’d be through in five.
“This is the police! Slide your weapon to the top of the stairs where we can see it and come forward with your hands on your head.”
Goddamn it, not now! I was almost there! I had to stall ’em. Time to play as crazy as Leigh thought I was. The cops killed burglars, but they were always real nice to wackos who were a danger to themselves.
“Don’t come up! I’ll kill myself! I’ve got a gun!”
There was a pause. I could hear the cops whispering to each other. I swung the statue again, and cracked mortar. Bricks were hanging loose.
“Hey up there, take it easy! What are you doing?”
I laughed like a maniac and swung again. “I’m digging my own grave!”
A brick tumbled out of the chimney, and more cracked and shifted.
“Come on, now. Stop that. Put down the gun and let’s talk this out. What do you want?”
Smash! I hit the chimney again. “I want out! I can’t stand it anymore!”
“Well, we’re here to get you out. We’re here to help.”
Another swing and the marble base went flying, spanging off a stack of cookie tins. But bricks went flying too, and through the gap I could see wood. I dropped the statue and started tearing out the loose bricks with my bare hands. There was an old wooden box back there, all scarred up, with writing burned into it—Army of the Confederacy.
“Hey, did you hear us? We’re here to help.”
I shouted over my shoulder as I worked my fingers behind the box and tried to lever it out of the hole. “I don’t want your help! I wanna leave this world behind!”
I heard a step on the stair. “Listen, I’m just gonna come up there and we’ll talk this—”
“Don’t come up! I’ll shoot myself! I swear I will!”
The cop retreated. “Don’t do that. Come on. This is nothing to kill yourself over. You haven’t hurt anybody. We can resolve this.”
I braced a foot against the chimney and wrenched as hard as I could. The box ripped out, showering bricks everywhere, and caught me in the chest. It was like an engine block. I staggered back and went ass over tits over one of the suitcases I’d dumped, the box crushing my ribs then slipping off and slamming to the floor.
“She’s down! She’s down! Go go go!”
I sat up, gasping, and saw the shadows of the cops charging up the stairs, guns out. I looked at the box. The lid had split and something inside was glowing a pale lemonade green. Time to go.
I shoved the lid aside. There was another rocket-finned clock thing in there, just like the one in the cave. I stretched for the gem in its center.
The cops saw me reaching. “She’s going for a gun!”
The last thing I heard as my fingertips touched the cold smooth surface of the gem was the double bang of two police-issue nine millimeters firing at my heart.