All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(41)

Then the memory ended, and I found myself back in the real world: sitting on the concrete bench outside the converted service station, with Frankie’s hand warm and dry and big-knuckled in mine, and so exhausted I could barely keep my head up.

“You all right?” Frankie asked. “You’ve gone all noodley on me.”

“Fine. Rough day.”

“They aren’t all rough, my fine young friend. I promise they aren’t.” With a smile he pumped my hand once and let it drop.

As he tottered away from the station, a question returned to me, and I called after him, “Frankie, what do you dream about?”

When he looked back, I caught a trace of fear on his face, genuine, unadulterated, like something dipped from the bottom of a tar pit. Then it was gone, and he smiled that winter-bright smile and said, “They were just dreams, Mr. Eliot. Just dreams. They’re gone with the daylight.”

“What, though? What dreams?”

“Why, the oldest dreams of all, Mr. Eliot. I dreamed I was being chased.”





As Frankie disappeared around the block with a final wave, I considered his parting words. Dreams about being chased. The oldest kind of dream, he had said. And I thought about Becca’s dream, the dream I had slipped into. And I thought of the beast behind the door of Jigger Boss, the beast that had torn through steel and raced towards us, slavering, to tear us apart. The cut on the back of my neck stung. It hadn’t been just a dream. And neither, I suspected, had been Frankie’s.

With a roar and a cloud of exhaust, the Greyhound pulled away from the station. Sunlight shone off the chrome and glass, and the bus looked like a fiery arrow shooting off into the distance. Then, as it took a corner and moved out of the sunlight, it was just a bus again: dirty, dented, and limping.

I closed up the box, set it on my shoulder, and groaned as I got to my feet. The initial pain from Sal’s beating had faded, but it was transforming into stiffness and hidden aches. Now it only hurt when I moved. Or breathed. Or thought about it. As I got going, though, and moved towards the old service station’s building, some of the stiffness eased, even if the aches didn’t.

When I pushed through the front doors, I found myself in a cramped, tiled room that smelled like wet cigarettes, wet fabric, and something that made me think of an electric heater running too high. Aside from a middle-aged man behind a desk, the room was empty; everyone who had been waiting, I guessed, had just taken the bus out of town. I crossed to the desk. The middle-aged man, his balding patch glimmering under a single, low-wattage bulb, was playing a game on a flip-screen phone.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He coughed, looked up, and turned back to his phone.

“Excuse me.”

With a sigh, he put down the phone and struggled to straighten himself in the chair. “No buses leaving until ten o’clock. What’s the rush?”

“I want to talk to the manager, or your boss, or whoever’s in charge here.”

He had fuzzy, caterpillar eyebrows that had gone a yellowish white, and they were so thick that they almost hid his slow, incredulous blink. “You want what?”

“To talk to your boss.”

“June Ivy? You want to talk to June Ivy?” His hands drifted towards the phone.

I swallowed the first thing I wanted, which was to pound the flip-phone into this guy’s forehead so hard that it would stay there permanently. “If she’s the boss, then yes, I want to talk to her.”

“Oh no. Uh-uh. No way.”

“Why not?”

“She’s not here today.”

“When will she be here?”

Under those enormous, fuzzy eyebrows, his eyes contracted. “Who are you? I ain’t seen you around before.”

“I live in town. My name’s Vie.”

“What’s in that box?”

“Nothing.”

“It ain’t nothing if it’s in a box.”

“Who the hell cares what’s in the box? Listen, are you in charge today?”

“Maybe I am.”

I wanted to rub my head. I wanted to rub every aching inch of my body, because I was tired, and it had been a hell of day, and my patience had just snapped. “Maybe. That’s perfect. Maybe. Well, maybe, if you’re in charge, just maybe you could help me out. Maybe you could get me last night’s footage from the security cameras outside, because maybe I was robbed last night just outside this station.” That last part was a lie, of course, but it was the best I could come up with.

“You was robbed?”

“Oh my Jesus—yes. Last night. Robbed. Security cameras.”

“Nah.”

“What? What do you mean, nah?”

“You’re a big old plumed asshole, that’s why. And I think you’re fibbin’.”

“You think I’m fibbin’.”

He grunted, picked up the flip-phone, and slid back in his chair.

“Hey, I want that footage.”

“You want it, but you ain’t going to get it. Now you can come back and talk to June Ivy, but she ain’t going to give it to you either, because you are just about the worst kind of teenage prick I seen.”

“I was robbed—”

“You tell Sheriff Ed he can have whatever he wants whenever he wants it.”