The Fall of Never(124)

“You’ll get better here,” her mother told her and she stood beside her father in the doorway of Kelly’s new bedroom: white walls, bars on the windows, crisp white sheets that felt like construction paper.

“Yes,” agreed her father. “These people will know what to do with you.”

Kelly smiled at them both, causing them to take an unconscious step back toward the hallway. There was no humor in that smile. Her eyes looked dead. “You’re both just afraid of me,” she said, not sure why. “Both of you. See me here?” Her voice remained toneless and flat. “Remember this. And be thankful it ended this easy.”

Visibly shaken, her parents filed out into the hallway and never came back.

Little Baby Roundabout, Kelly thought, eyes wandering around the white room. Someone let the Baby out.





Chapter Twenty-Four


Jarred awake by the sound of shattering glass, Josh opened his eyes. It took him a moment to understand where he was. Not at home: there was an odor here of citrus. And then it hit him—Nellie’s apartment—and he rolled forward off the tiny sofa, barking his shin on the coffee table in the dark.

Is she dying? It was the first thing that crossed his mind. And almost selfishly on the heels of that: Then what about Kelly?

He tore down the hallway and threw open Nellie’s bedroom door. The shattering sound had been Nellie’s bedroom window exploding. Spear-like shards of glass remained like loose teeth in the frame, while triangles of windowpane were now scattered along the carpet and across the length of Nellie’s bed. The sheer curtains that hung at the window now twisted in the wind.

“Jesus!” He rushed to the bed, his bare feet crunching over the broken glass but hardly noticing. Nellie was pitched forward off her pillow, the woman’s eyes bugging out, her good hand hooked into a talon and clawing at her throat. “Jesus Christ, can you breathe?”

Nellie could not see nor hear him. Mere inches from her face, and the old woman’s eyes ran right through to the back of his head. Half her face radiated with the reflection of the neon city, and Josh watched helplessly as her mouth worked but no words came out, and as her hand tore at her neck.

“Nellie!”

He tried to ease her down onto the bed but she refused to be moved. He tried again—yet this time he quickly recoiled, shocked and terrified by the sudden sensation of collapse inside him…as if two invisible hands had grabbed his heart and started to squeeze.

Nellie, his mind stammered, was that you? Reaching out for me?

Scared, he pushed back through the room, feeling the cuts on his feet now, feeling the freezing wind coming through the shattered window, and dashed into the hallway, through the small sitting room, into the kitchen. He’d pasted Carlos Mendes’s beeper number to the telephone. He grabbed the slip of paper now, his heart pumping so loudly he could hear it in his ears, and fumbled with the phone. He attempted to dial the numbers but he fingers were too big. After three failed attempts, he took a deep breath and dialed the number once more.

Paging Doctor Mendes, he thought. Doctor Mendes, you have a patient going into telekinetic fits in the next room. Please report to the emergency room STAT.

And what could Mendes do, anyway?

He waited for the prompt, then punched in Nellie’s number, hit the pound key. Three short beeps rang out over the line.

Jesus, hurry!

From behind him there came a sound like fingernails being dragged along a chalkboard. He turned and saw a hairline crack weaving along the windowpane above the sink. He watched it with numb detachment.

Is that you, Nellie? Is that you? What happened, what did you see? What did you see that’s making your mind tear down this apartment?

The window began rattling in its frame. Josh hung up the phone and began backing out of the kitchen, not taking his eyes from the window. He was mesmerized by it, powerless to look away. He could see his own reflection in the glass, facing him, also retreating, growing smaller…only the reflected Josh had been decapitated by the lengthening crack, his features a jumble of maundering jigsaw pieces.

Nellie—

The window burst from the pane, shooting spears of glass at him and the opposite wall. Bringing up his arms, elbows out, he felt the glass pelt him, felt a sudden stink followed by warm wetness on the side of his right hand. Beside him, he could hear the glass shattering against the kitchen wall. One piece struck a pot on the stove and was deflected with a distinct cling!

Stumbling into the sitting room, Josh scrambled for the light switch but could not locate it. A sharp winter wind struck his back from the kitchen. He pushed around the sofa just as he heard that same fingers-on-a-chalkboard grind. Looking up, he could see the row of windows covered by curtains, lights from the city glowing behind the curtains’ sheer fabric. They looked like flesh…like spread batwings before a blinding light. And he could clearly make out the spider-web fissures progressing rigidly along the faces of the windowpanes.

They’re all going to implode, he told himself. They’re all going to smash open and pepper this place in glass.

And he was in the wrong goddamn spot.

To his left, the old phonograph snapped to life, the sounds of Duke Ellington starting off slow, distorted…then gathering momentum. It was like a nightmare fun-house. And what about Nellie? Was she dead? Dying? In all the commotion, it seemed like he’d run frantic out of her bedroom no less than an hour ago. But surely it hadn’t been more than a minute or two.