The Night Parade(100)
Despite his nightly reassurances to his daughter, he had a bad feeling about the direction of things. He had mentioned to Kathy a few times lately that he wanted her to come home with him. But she said she was okay, that she could stick it out. She’d insisted.
Earlier that day, he’d commented to Dr. Kapoor about the pallor of Kathy’s skin. She’d become jaundiced, with bruise-colored hollows under each eye. She had lost so much weight in such a brief amount of time—there was no question about that—and the result was eerie, causing the flesh of her face to stretch taut around her skull, which gave her cheekbones an unnatural emphasis. Her fingers had slimmed, and as David sat beside her bed that afternoon eating lunch, they’d both heard the clinking of her wedding band as it fell from her finger and tink-tink-tinked across the floor. He’d picked it up and tried to slide it back on her finger, but she pulled her hand away, almost embarrassed, and shook her head. No. No. For a moment, there was a strange telescopic look in her eyes, much like the lens of a camera as it adjusts to focus on something at some great distance.
“You keep it for me,” she’d said.
He had it in his pocket now. He dug it out and pushed it onto his pinkie. It fit.
“Something’s wrong with her,” David had expressed to Dr. Kapoor before leaving the facility that evening. They stood talking in the hallway outside Dr. Kapoor’s office, their voices low although there was no one around to eavesdrop. “She doesn’t look well.”
“We’ve been taking a lot of blood,” Dr. Kapoor said. “As long as we keep her on the IV, though, everything will be fine. The weight loss comes from her lack of appetite. She gives us trouble about eating.”
“You’ve taken her off her psych meds, the antidepressants. She’s distraught.”
“It’s necessary for the blood work, the cultures. I assure you, Mr. Arlen, that she is getting all the proper nutrients through the IV.”
He took Dr. Kapoor at his word, though he didn’t feel good about doing it.
That night, he drank a whole six-pack of Flying Dog while watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind on AMC. By the time Richard Dreyfuss found himself surrounded by those bug-eyed, long-limbed extraterrestrials, David was half in the bag. He rarely got drunk and never when he was home alone with Ellie, but he cut himself some slack tonight.
When the movie was over, he shut the TV off but remained on the couch, staring off into the darkness while the wall clock in the kitchen kept a metronomic beat. There was a drip in the kitchen sink, too, a steady and repetitive plink! every few seconds, and he focused on that for a while in his drunkenness. But then some nonspecific disquiet roused him just as he was about to slip into unconsciousness, and he got up, wended down the hall in the dark, and checked on Ellie. She was still sound asleep in bed. On the nightstand beside her was the shoe box containing the bird eggs. Ellie was not the source of his disquiet, he realized: It was something else. Without disturbing her, he kissed the warm and dewy side of her head, then retreated back out into the living room.
Before going to sleep, he peered out the front windows. It was as if something was beckoning to him. Across the street, the houses were dark, silent.
The white van was still parked along the curb.
And he realized it was the van that troubled him, although he had no idea why.
How do I know that van? Where have I seen it before?
In the dark, he collected the six empty beer bottles from the coffee table and carried them into the foyer. There, he set them up in a line on the floor in front of the door—an adult version of Ellie’s Night Parade. When he finished, he checked the dead bolt to make sure he’d locked it before returning to the warm indentation on the couch.
54
He stood barefoot on a gravelly patch of earth, watching as a parade of impossible animals campaigned along the desolate countryside in a single-file line that stretched all the way to the horizon. They were prehistoric in their hugeness, yet there was nothing mammalian about them. Instead, they appeared insectoid, multi-legged and wielding great segmented antennae, with shimmering, chitinous carapaces and eyes like swirling, gaseous planets. Their massive, spine-laden feet punched craters in the earth, and their sheer size blocked out the sun. Massive machinelike limbs muscled over trees and brushed against the sides of shallow mountain ranges. When these monstrous creatures reached civilization, David saw that all the buildings were decimated and abandoned, like those of ancient Greece or the bombed-out cities of some Middle Eastern country, and there were no signs of human life anywhere. Or at least it appeared so, until a figure materialized from within the shadows of a crumbling brick alleyway. A ghost-shape. The figure was slight, sinewy, feminine, with long hair hanging over her face. She looked like a teenager, perhaps even older, her clothes filthy and nothing more than rags, her arms piebald with bruises and abrasions. Her bare feet left bloody footprints on the dusty pavement. As David watched, the woman’s hair swung away from her face and, despite her years—despite the feral, detached look in her eyes and the broken shards of teeth that gnashed and chattered endlessly, madly—David recognized his daughter.
David awoke in a bedroom with blank alabaster walls and a single window at his back. He was sprawled out on a bed, his hair still damp from the shower he’d taken, and he was dressed in the clean clothes Tim had given him, though he could not remember getting dressed. As consciousness fell fully upon him, he was aware of a small headache jackhammering at his right temple. He realized he had come in here to lie down for a few minutes after showering and getting dressed, but the time—and his own consciousness, apparently—had been siphoned from him. Judging by the murky seawater quality of the daylight coming through the partially shuttered bedroom window, David guessed he’d been asleep for a few hours.