The Night Parade(49)

There was also the distinct odor of shit in the air.

“Jimmy,” Turk said.

The boy turned his head the way a ventriloquist’s dummy might. He had a face similar to Sam’s, though less meaty, and there was dried blood crusted around each of his nostrils. His eyes looked like twin mirrors facing each other, with no comprehension behind them whatsoever. Just idiocy.

“He’s sick,” David said.

“Yeah,” Turk said. “He’s got the Folly, all right. Had it for nearly two months now.”

“Two months?” It must have been a record.

“Far as we can tell, anyway,” Turk said.

“There’s butterflies in your hair, Sam,” Jimmy said to Turk. The boy’s voice was raspy, ruinous. Probably from screaming himself hoarse. Some of the infected screamed until their throats ruptured. Yet there was an eerie singsong quality to this boy’s voice, and somehow that was worse.

“All right,” Turk said.

Jimmy turned those dead eyes on David. “Your hair, too, Sam.”

Turk put a hand on David’s shoulder and said, “He knows, sport. You hungry?”

“No, Sam.” An almost musical cadence.

“Okay. Good boy. Check on you later.”

“Good boy, Sam,” Jimmy intoned. A fresh trickle of blood began to seep from his left nostril.

“Jesus,” David said once Turk had shut and locked the door.

“He’s Sammy’s twin. Been callin’ everyone Sam for the past two weeks or so. Lord knows what delusion he’s riding now. It’s better than before. Used to be he’d scream himself raw, day and night, until his goddamn throat bled.”

“He hasn’t been to a doctor?”

“For what? So they can let him die in some hospital room? No, thank you. Besides, we’ve been taking care of him. His family. Ain’t no one could do it better for him. You think he would have lasted this long in some hospital?”

“Trust me, I’m no fan of doctors,” David said.

“Never have been, m’self,” said Turk.

“And he’s been like that for two months?”

“Give or take. Maybe been sick with it even longer than that, though with kids, it’s harder to tell. They’re always half-stuck in some dream world as it is, am I right?”

Not Ellie, David thought. Never Ellie. She has always been a practical child, a girl not prone to fancies or silliness. A pragmatic soul. Like her mother.

“We feed him, clean him, take care of him best we can,” Turk said. “We try to keep the end from coming.” Turk shrugged. They could have been talking about baseball scores for all his casualness. “It’s all we can do.”

“And no one else who’s been in contact with him has gotten sick?”

“No. Anyway, no one’s sure how people even catch the damn thing to begin with. Some think it’s airborne, others say it’s in the water. Even the government’s come out and said it might just be hanging in the air and absorbed through the skin. Heck, who’s to say it ain’t genetics? Who’s to say some of us ain’t just born with it and now it’s coming active inside our brains?”

“You could be right. It’s almost like—”

Something slammed against the other side of the door, causing them both to jump. The door bucked in its frame, and the crucifix fell from its nail and thudded to the carpet. David took a step back, but Turk remained planted to the spot, a look of consternation on his hardened, sun-reddened face. A muffled moan reverberated against the door, and then it bucked a second time against the frame. It was Jimmy, throwing himself against the door.

“Let’s head on back downstairs,” Turk suggested, his voice lowered now. “He don’t like us standing out here jawin’ about him, is all.”





24


Pauline invited them to stay for dinner, and David accepted. He was aware that Turk had stashed the Glock somewhere and he didn’t want to leave without it, so he thought it best to respond in a positive light to their hospitality. Hopefully he could earn Turk’s trust and he’d give him back the gun. Despite the discomfort of knowing they kept their terminally ill son locked in a bedroom upstairs, handprints stamped in shit on the walls, there was still a level of trust and even comfort David felt around this family. He wondered if it was because his own family, over just the course of a handful of days, had essentially disintegrated.

Ellie had brightened a bit toward Sam, too, and after David came down from using their shower (dressed now in one of Turk’s clean T-shirts, this one a Mot?rhead concert tee about two sizes too big), he found them both in the living room watching a DVD of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. David paused in the doorway and watched his daughter for several seconds. She had never been the type of girl to dress up like a princess or sing along with a movie’s soundtrack, and even now she sat watching the movie cross-legged on the carpet, the look on her face one of studious incredulity at the sight of an animated anthropomorphic teapot lecturing like a British schoolmarm. Yet some fashion of levity had come into her countenance, some brand of innocence and awe that seemed more befitting of an eight-year-old girl than the dark suspicion that also hung just behind her eyes. David had always thought she was too smart for her own good, and too practical to maintain many friendships with girls who just wanted to play dress-up and house, so it did him some good to see a softness in her profile now. Beside her, Sam narrated the events of the film a few seconds ahead of the action, something that the old Ellie would have found annoying. But now she was actually smiling at the boy.