Glimmering

The air was so still that he could hear the thrum of a single car echoing from far away, solid and portentous as the tolling of a church bell. He listened raptly as it drove off; then the sound of weeping stirred him again and he strode down toward the garden.

He had thought—hoped, actually—that whoever it was would have fled by the time he got outside, or at least fallen silent. Instead the cries grew louder and more desperate. Jack shook his head, dismayed.

“Hey,” he called softly. “It’s okay. I’m not—I won’t hurt you.”

The weeping ceased, then with a hoarse cry resumed, so close that Jack took a nervous sideways step. He looked at the sodden limbs of juniper and ilex, streaked black and shimmering in the purplish light. Water pooled about his boots, releasing a thick rank smell as of spoiled mushrooms. He was just starting for the yew hedge when he saw her.

It was the child he had seen in his vision: the child who had led the procession of horned men. The same white face and windblown hair, the same wide empty eyes, the same thin mouth opened now to weep rather than blow upon a flute. But even as he stared aghast the child turned, so that Jack saw it was not a child but a girl of fourteen or fifteen, so emaciated and frail she looked younger. Her cheeks were hollowed, touched with violet where the light struck them, her sunken eyes a vivid troubling blue. She crouched beneath a hydrangea bush, fingers curled about a handful of moldering leaves and her lips drawn back so that he could see her teeth, very white above gums that were almost black. She wore some kind of cheap raincoat, the plastic ripped and gummed with filth. Beneath it Jack could glimpse filthy white pants and a shapeless shirt, ripped so that her small breasts were exposed. As she stared at him she made a hissing sound.

“Hey,” whispered Jack, and backed away. The girl watched him with eyes empty of anything but raw fear. If he extended a hand to her, he was certain she would bite, and he knew what that bite would bring: plague, pestilence, death.

But then, without thinking, Jack did reach for her, palm up as he would approach a strange dog. The girl’s gaze wavered between his face and his hand, as though weighing which held the greater threat. With a low cry she lifted her head and stared unblinking into his eyes. He stared back and saw hatred, dreadful hunger, and an unassailable fear; but mostly fear.

And so he knelt before her, awkwardly pulling at his raincoat as he murmured, “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you, come here, come here…”

The coat billowed about her shoulders and he reached clumsily to straighten it, but it was like cloaking a bare scaffold: he could feel nothing but the dead stalks of hydrangea. He drew back, forcing a smile.

“There. Are you better now? Warmer?”

The girl looked up at him, her lusterless hair like dead grass. She seemed not to understand, but finally she nodded.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She had a vaguely European accent.

“You’re welcome.” He stood and he gazed down at the girl, torn between his desire to hurry back inside and the burgeoning awareness that, having started something, he couldn’t leave it unfinished.

“Shit,” he said. The girl began to weep again, silently, tears fine as needles streaking her gaunt face. Not just the act of cloaking her but the coat itself had given something of humanity back to her. For a cruel moment Jack cursed himself for not going out in his pajamas.

“Come on, then.” He sighed. “I can’t leave you out here to die on the fucking lawn.”

Once again he stretched his hand toward her. The girl crouched, then with a shiver stood on unsteady feet. She ignored his hand and stumbled forward, slowly at first, then faster and faster, passing from grass to broken tarmac as she hurried up the drive. Jack hoped she would break into a run and flee Lazyland. But when he reached the top of the drive she was waiting, clutching his grandfather’s raincoat around her narrow shoulders.

Jack’s resignation burned into soft despair. “The front door.” He gestured at the house. “Don’t worry, I’m coming.

“Now listen,” Jack said as he pulled the outer door shut. She smelled like rotting leaves. “My grandmother lives here, she’s very old and frail, and I don’t want you—bugging her.”

The girl stared as though he had barked like a dog. Jack elbowed past her toward the inner door, calling out.

“Grandmother? Grandmother, there’s someone here, don’t—”

He stopped and glanced back at the girl. I must be fucking crazy. What was he thinking, telling her about his grandmother? Some insane little bitch planning to rob them in their sleep, or waiting to signal her cronies to break into Lazyland and kill them all…

His grandmother appeared at the foot of the stairs.

“Yes, Jackie?”

The girl made a low mewling sound, and with surprising strength, pushed past him.