The Narrows(96)

Aaron Kilpatrick lit his cigarette with a flashy gold Zippo then extended the flame toward Maggie.

In a tiny voice, she said, “I really don’t want—”

“Smoke it,” he barked, uncompromising.

She poked the cigarette between her lips and inhaled as her father held the flame to the tip of the cigarette. Afraid to inhale in front of him, she just let the thing dangle lifelessly from her mouth.

Her father capped the lighter then tossed it onto the dashboard where it joined a container of Skoal and a scattering of bottle caps. In silence, he smoked and admired the view through the windshield.

After a little while, he said, “Your mother is concerned that you’ve been hanging out with some boys.” The word boys caused her to cringe inwardly. “Is that true?” And before she could answer—not that she was quick to answer—he followed up with, “Don’t lie to me, now, Margaret.”

She swallowed foul-tasting spit. “Sometimes me and Susan Winterbarger and Caroline Hunt hang out in the park with some boys from school.”

“Mmm-hmm,” her father hummed, nodded. He was still looking over the hill and down at the town. “What you girls been doin’ with them boys?”

What had she been doing? Images flashed like a filmstrip before her eyes—all the inappropriate things she had done with the boys, Bobby Douglass in particular. She had kissed him on the mouth several times and she had let him touch her chest (even though there wasn’t much there to touch, unlike Suzie Winterbarger, who actually had Once, Bobby had even showed her his boobs). thing. They had been in the woods behind the elementary school and completely unprovoked Bobby had taken down his pants, revealing a horrific little mushroom that Maggie found at once both ridiculous and terrifying. He’d asked her if she wanted to touch it and she had said no…but there had been a part of her that had wanted to touch it. What did it feel like?

But Christ, she couldn’t say these things to her father. She just stared at him, her face slack, the Marlboro pinched between two fingers.

“You been doing things with boys you shouldn’t be?” he rasped through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“No, sir.”

“You been kissin’ up on some boys?”

“No,” she said. Her lower lip trembled and her vision abruptly blurred.

“You been showin’ boys what you got?”

“No…”

One of her father’s big, meaty, workman’s hands shot out and gripped her hard around the forearm, eliciting a weak cry as he dragged her closer to himself across the bench seat.

“What you got to show anyone, huh? What you got?”

“Daddy!” She screamed and closed her eyes and felt his big paws suddenly all over, suddenly everywhere. She bucked and kicked her legs and one of her shins cracked against the underside of the dashboard. She howled and her father cracked her firmly across the face. The smell of his aftershave mingling with the stink of his cigarette smoke caused her throat to burn and her eyes to spill tears.

“What you got, Margaret? What you got?”

She screamed again…and this time the scream traveled straight through space and time until it finally resonated now in the center of Maggie Quedentock’s head as she sat motionless in the jail cell. The power of that scream caused her eyes to water and her hands to tremble in her lap. She thought she could feel her blood pumping throughout every single vein and artery in her body. In her shoes, her toes felt like cold little marbles.

Across the room, the bundle on the desk moved.

It was almost imperceptible and Maggie would have missed it had she not been staring straight at it. She blinked and cleared her vision just in time to see the gray blanket—or whatever was wrapped in the gray blanket—move again. Something was shifting within.

Her eyes shifted to the doorway. Shadows moved back and forth out there and she could still hear people talking in hushed voices. When she looked back at the thing on the desk, she found the shape beneath the blanket sitting upright. A cool sweat prickled Maggie’s scalp. She saw a pale hand slide out from beneath the blanket and felt her heart seize in her chest. The suggestion of a foot pressed against the dark fabric of the blanket.

No—

A section of the blanket fell away. In the half-light, a face was revealed to her. Eyes like simmering white-hot coals and a wide mouth dotted with tiny teeth, the f*cking thing actually grinned at her.

Maggie tried to scream but could not find her voice.

The thing slipped off the table amid a flutter of blanket and crinkling tarpaulin. She heard its bare feet strike the floor on the other side of the desk. As it scurried across the room in the dark, she could see its childlike form briefly silhouetted as it passed in front of the doorway that led out into the hall.

Then Maggie did scream—a throat-cracking, strangled bleat.

The voices out in the hall rose. Both officers filed into the room. One of them—the skinnier of the two—came over to the cell and peered through the bars at her, his sallow face twisted into grim incomprehension.

“What’s—” he began, just as the officer behind him screamed shrilly. He spun around and Maggie rushed against the bars in time to see the larger officer stagger blindly until his back struck one wall. He was covering his face…and there was something over his face—a greenish slime in which his fingers sank up to the knuckles. What looked like steam radiated from the ooze and Maggie thought she could hear a faint sizzling sound. A second later, the stink of burning flesh filled her nose.