The Night Parade(15)

He felt the urge to call someone on the drive home, but who would that be? The police? The fire department? The goddamn ASPCA?

It was generally a thirty-minute commute home, but an accident on the beltway had knotted up traffic near Baltimore, and David found himself staring at a wall of taillights for over an hour. Rain began to fall. To make matters worse, someone thumped against his rear bumper, and David had to get out and examine the damage. There was only a faint white scuff on the Bronco’s rear bumper, but it was enough to cause him greater unease. He couldn’t stop hearing the shriek of those birds, the terrible sounds they made as they smashed through windshields and caved in the hoods and roofs of those cars.

By the time he turned onto Columbus Court, it was just after ten o’clock. He was starving—the last thing he’d eaten was an apple with peanut butter around noon—and his mood hadn’t changed much since getting his bumper nudged on the beltway. When he heard his cell phone chime, he groaned and fumbled it out of his jacket pocket. It was a text from Kathy, asking where he was. When he glanced back up, the pale shape of a man, illuminated by the Bronco’s headlights, filled his windshield.

David simultaneously jerked the wheel and jumped on the brake. Had he been driving a less weighty vehicle, the thing would have fishtailed or simply plowed into the man. But the Bronco was a sturdy ride, and it shuddered to a stop in the middle of the street.

“Holy shit.” The words wheezed out of him in sour notes, as if he were a punctured accordion. He spun around in his seat, craning his neck to glimpse the pale figure through the side window. David didn’t think he’d struck the man—he was still standing, after all—but he couldn’t be positive. The damn fool had appeared out of nowhere.

David climbed out of the Bronco, his sweat-dampened shirt growing chill in the cold night. He hustled around to the rear of the Bronco and saw the man still standing there, now tinted red in the glow of the Bronco’s taillights.

It was Deke Carmody, clad in nothing but a pair of threadbare boxer shorts. Deke’s ample gut spilled over the boxers’ waistband, a runway of black hair rising from his navel and fanning out across his heavy, sagging breasts. His feet were bare, and as David stared at him, Deke took a shuffling step toward him through a puddle of black water.

“Deke, what the hell are you doing out here?”

“That you, David?”

“Look at you.” David approached him, touched the man on one shoulder. Deke’s flesh was cold, wet, and knobby with goose bumps. The feel of it made David recoil, and he was quick to withdraw his hand. “What’s going on here, Deke?”

Deke blinked at him, as if to clear his vision. There was muddled confusion in his eyes. David wondered if Deke was in shock from having nearly been run over.

“Hey, David.” Deke broke into a wide smile. The sight of it chilled David further. “How you been?”

“Deke, man, why are you standing out here in the middle of the night in your underwear?”

Deke glanced down. His bare feet shuffled around in the puddle. His toes were practically blue. When he looked up and met David’s eyes again, there was still no clarity there.

“Come on,” David said, grasping Deke high on one forearm; it seemed his fingers sank too easily into the pliable flesh. “First thing, let’s get you inside.”

“Oh,” Deke said. “Okay, David.”

David led Deke up the walk of the man’s house. When he reached out and grasped the doorknob, he found the knob wouldn’t turn.

“Christ. Door’s locked, Deke. You locked yourself out. In your undies, no less.”

“Side door’s unlocked, I think,” Deke said.

“Let’s go see,” David said. Still clutching Deke’s forearm, he went around the side of the house and found the side door was, in fact, unlocked. And not just unlocked—open. David glanced at Deke again, hoping to ascertain some semblance of normalcy behind the man’s eerie, vacuous stare. But Deke Carmody’s eyes were like two dead headlamps. It was like some vital fuse had burned out inside of him.

“Go on,” David said, urging him toward the doorway. “Get in.”

Deke shuffled inside and David followed. The lights were off, and David felt along one wall for the switch. When he found it, he flipped it on, and the single bulb over the kitchen sink winked on. Deke quit shuffling and stared up at the naked bulb as if in awe.

Unmarried and without children, Deke Carmody lived alone. The house was the domicile of a lifelong bachelor, complete with dirty dishes stacked in the sink and the smell of burnt coffee in the air. But as David looked around, he saw that things had been changed, and in a way that set him on alert. David’s first thought was that Deke’s house had been burglarized . . . but on closer inspection, he realized that no burglar would bother doing the things to Deke’s house that David was observing. Kitchen chairs, for instance, hadn’t simply been knocked to the floor; instead, they were stacked on the kitchen table. The sight of them was jarring. When he turned around, he saw that all the cupboard doors stood open. Boxes of cereal and canned goods had been arranged in careful pyramids on the countertops. David couldn’t help himself—he thought of poltergeists and exorcisms.

“What’s been going on here, Deke?”

“You know,” Deke muttered, shuffling out of the kitchen and into the living room. He said no more.