The Night Bird (Frost Easton #1)(24)

Christie wanted to shut her eyes, but he used gray sticky tape to seal her eyelid to her lash. First one, then the other. The moisture in her eyes dried immediately, and her eyeballs felt as if they would come loose and roll away. Pain grew in a circle in her sockets. She needed to blink; all she could think about was how much she needed to blink, but she couldn’t. She could only stare at the bug eyes and hideous grin of the mask.

Not the song, she wanted to say. Please not the song.

She remembered now. The song opened the door. The song sent her to the devil and the darkness. She wanted to scream at him and plead with him, but something was in her mouth—cloth filling every space, shutting out air and sound. All she could do was squeal in protest through her nose, making a whimpering noise. The mask giggled at her, like a child playing with an ant.

“The song is here,” he sang. “See what you fear!”

Christie screamed, not out loud, but from inside her brain. It did nothing to stop what was happening to her. The song began. The music was smooth, gentle, not scary at all, but as the lyrics played, the empty whiteness changed. Things appeared on the walls and ceiling and floor, and at first, she couldn’t see what they were, but then the room seemed to shrink inch by inch, and she realized the room was lined with needles.

Thousands and thousands of needles, glinting sharp and silver. Jutting out. Three-dimensional. Sleek and long.

Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Anything but needles.

The walls moved. The ceiling moved. Or that was how it felt to her. The needles grew in her vision. Christie saw other things now. Eyeballs appeared and floated in the air—dozens of individual blue eyes with long lashes, just like hers—and as the walls ground closer, the needles punctured each eyeball, oozing blood and vitreous gel, gathering them up like meat on a skewer. She screamed and screamed and screamed and didn’t make a sound.

A face took shape among the needles. Not a face. The mask. Its grinning mouth opened and sang the song. The music became the soundtrack to a horror film as the bloody needles zeroed in on her body. Her skin. Her face. They grew larger and larger as they came closer.

The voice sang in her ear, “Christie, Christie.”

And then a command: “Run.”

Over and over: “Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.”

She tried. She could feel her arms pumping, her legs racing, her heart hammering in her chest as she went faster and faster, but she couldn’t outrun the needles. Patiently, inexorably, they came for her. To stab her. To puncture her. To slit her through and through with a thousand wounds.

“Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run.”

Christie’s open eyes saw the needles. Her soundless screams became an unending wail for help, but there was no help. The glistening points of the needles filled her sight, so close she could feel the metal points pushing on the damp surface of her cornea, pricking their way inside. Her entire world became nothing but needles. There was a needle for every pore on her skin.

Her mind broke.

Her mind fell through a window and shattered into pieces. She wasn’t even aware of the real, tiny stab of a needle in her arm, or of the terror receding as her consciousness slipped away into blackness again.





12


Frost stared at the three wooden planks fixed to the side of a sheer cliff face, making a walkway barely eighteen inches wide. There was no railing, just swags of chain nailed to the rock like Christmas tinsel. On the open side of the planks, the cliff descended straight down into a thousand feet of air. Gnarled, wind-swept trees sprouted from its rocky crevices. Misty mountains filled the distance.

As he examined the weathered beams mounted on the rock, a five-year-old with a vanilla ice cream cone ran through the open canyon to her mother. The tourists crowded around the painting in Ghirardelli Square laughed nervously. It was just a three-dimensional sidewalk illusion, but it was so real that Lucy, with her vertigo, would have fainted.

Frost sat down next to the artist on the stone steps of the plaza’s mermaid fountain. Water gurgled and splashed over brass turtles and bare breasts. The morning sun cast shadows across their faces. The iconic chocolate factory sign loomed above them, and he could smell sweetness in the air.

“Impressive, Herb,” Frost said. “Please tell me that’s not a real place.”

“It is, actually. That’s the famous plank walk on Hua Shan mountain in China.”

“Have you done it?”

“I have.”

Frost wasn’t surprised. Herb was the kind of man who’d lived ten lifetimes in almost seventy years. “And why would anyone do something like that?” he asked.

“A Buddhist would probably say to gain enlightenment,” Herb replied, “but honestly, I was stoned out of my mind.”

Frost laughed. The omnipresent aroma of pot from Herb’s paint-stained flannel shirt was enough to intoxicate anyone who spent too much time with him. He had leathery white skin, dark eyes, and black glasses with tiny magnifiers for close-up work. He was skinny and tall, and he limped because of the time he spent painting on his knees. Shack sat in the artist’s lap, and the black-and-white cat batted at the multicolored beads strung into Herb’s long gray hair.

They’d been friends for fifteen years. Even in a melting pot city like San Francisco, Herb was one of a kind. He knew everybody. Hippies. Fishermen. Gays. Radicals. Yuppies. Techies. He’d spent four terms on the city council in the ’80s, but for as long as Frost could remember, he’d simply painted elaborate sidewalk illusions around the city. He’d been featured on The Tonight Show and Good Morning America and had appeared in a dozen San Francisco–based movies.