The Night Parade(93)

“No,” Gany said. “Tim said no stopping. We don’t stop.”

David looked at her. She was right; he knew that she was.

“All right,” he said. He spun the steering wheel and rolled the Cadillac up onto the shoulder. There were grooves in the pavement, which caused the car to vibrate.

“But someone might be hurt, Dad.”

“There’s enough people around to help out,” he said. His hands were tight on the wheel, the vibrations traveling up his arms. Trees encroached upon the shoulder and he brought the car nearly to a stop in order to navigate around them.

“Hey, *!” someone shouted at them.

“Roll your window up,” David instructed.

Gany started to roll her window up . . . then paused. David eased down on the brake and followed her gaze. They were directly across from the Corolla now, and David saw that the driver’s door stood open and that a slim brunette had staggered several feet from the vehicle, dragging the rigid body of a child toward the center of the road. The woman held the child under the armpits, and at first David thought the kid was unconscious or possibly even dead until he saw the face.

The child was a girl, maybe a bit older than Ellie, mousy brown hair like her mother’s streaking across her pallid, sweaty face. She wore jean shorts, the hems of which were nothing but stringy white tassels. Her legs were smooth and white, the knees pink. A torrent of blood gushed from both nostrils, soaking her powder-blue shirt with a rhinestone unicorn on it. When her head lolled in David’s direction, he saw that she was perfectly conscious. The girl exposed all her bloodstained teeth in a hideous grin. When her hair fell away, David saw that her eyes were blind with madness and swelling from their sockets. As if to give David a show, the girl began chattering her blood-flecked teeth, that rictus grin fixed firmly on her face.

“Drive, David. Go.”

For a split second, his foot forgot which pedal was the accelerator and which was the brake.

“Daddy,” Ellie said again, her voice a rising whine. She grabbed a fistful of his shirt.

The woman in the street shrieked, “My baby! My baby!”

The would-be Samaritans froze in their haste to assist the woman, quickly turning into a gaggle of gape-mouthed onlookers too terrified to get any closer.

“My baby girl!”

That bloodied rictus grin persisted. David thought he could even hear the clatter of her teeth—clack-clack-clack-clack! The light behind those hideous mad eyes was nearly luminous. She flailed in her mother’s arms, and a too-white sneaker came off one slender foot and lay by itself now in the sun.

“Drive the car, man,” Gany said. She whipped her head around to glare at him.

Yet before he could snap out of it and plant the accelerator on the floor, he heard the Caddy’s back door pop open. A second later, he saw Ellie running across the highway toward the woman and the sick girl.

“Holy shit,” Gany said.

David hopped out of the car and chased after his daughter. In the road, the mother struggled with the girl, shrieking and calling for help. The girl twisted loose and staggered like a zombie a step or two in no particular direction, her one bare foot slapping on the blacktop. Her jaw chattered like some electric machine.

“Ellie!” David cried after her.

Ellie did not stop running, did not turn to look at him. She approached the girl, who cocked her head at a terrible angle, and only then did Ellie slow down to a deliberate walk. Blood sluiced from the girl’s nose. Her eyes blazed like twin moons.

“Ellie!”

Ellie reached out and grabbed one of the girl’s wrists.

A second after that, David reached her. He wrapped an arm around her waist and, with his other hand, tried to break Ellie’s hold on the girl’s wrist. Yet, at that same moment, he was overcome by such a powerful jolt that his vision briefly flickered to darkness. A moment later, he felt all his terror drain from him, leaving behind a vast, windy cavern of peacefulness, and he felt— (calm perfect calm you can even sleep now if you want it’s so calm it’s so perfect it’s living up here in the cool grass and streams and the mountains and flying like a bird yes that’s right you’re flying you’re flying like a bird that’s how calm it is how calm how calm how calm you’re flying flying) Ellie shoved him away. He staggered backward, the panic and fear flooding back into his body like boiling water, causing sweat to burst from his pores and his heart to hammer. So overwhelmed by the abrupt shift in emotion, he found he could do nothing but stand there, helpless, terrified.

He realized at one point that Ellie and the girl were no longer standing, but that the girl was laid out supine on the blacktop with her head in Ellie’s lap. Ellie had a hand on either side of the girl’s head, and she was leaning forward so far that their foreheads nearly touched.

The girl had stopped chattering her teeth. Those eyes—those horrible, impossible eyes—had closed. Now her face was nothing but a smooth canvas of peace, as if she had fallen— (you can even sleep now if you want) —asleep.

“What is she doing?” It was Gany, speaking in a low voice very close to him, although it took him several seconds to realize this. Not that he could answer her—he no longer possessed the strength to speak.

The only other noise was the sound of the girl’s mother sobbing as she stood a few paces behind Ellie, her hands over her mouth. When her daughter’s body appeared to go slack, the woman issued a high-pitched whine and sank to her knees.