Black Creek Crossing (27 page)

He listened, and heard nothing.

He decided he must have been wrong.

Relaxing, Chad reached for the lamp on the bedside table.

The sound came again, but this time he recognized it. It was the same sound he’d just made.

He lay still, not even breathing, his hand hovering near the lamp.

The sound came again.

What was it? An owl?

But it didn’t sound like an owl—it sounded like
him
trying to sound like an owl!

What—

And then he knew! It had to be Jared—or maybe Zack—playing a trick on him.

Or maybe signaling him to come out! He and Jared had snuck out at least half a dozen times last summer and never come close to getting caught. Chad slid out of bed and pulled on his clothes. Going to the door of his room, he listened, then opened it a crack and listened again.

The hall outside was dark and silent, but he could hear his father snoring even through the door to his parents’ bedroom.

Closing his door, Chad went to the window, unlatched it, and raised the lower casement. It creaked a little, and the counterweights in the frame rattled, but he knew that even if his mother was awake, she’d have her earplugs in to cut down the racket of his dad’s snoring.

“Jared?” he called softly.

There was no reply, except for the same strange hooting sound that had brought him to the window. A cold draft of air flowed in the open window, a draft unlike anything Chad had felt before. The cold seemed to reach inside him, and for a terrible instant he had the feeling he was dying.

Holding perfectly still, he strained his eyes and ears, searching for the source of the sound that had caused him to suddenly freeze.

But he saw nothing, and a moment later realized he heard nothing either—not even the last of the crickets and frogs that were so loud during the summer that they kept him awake, and which he’d still heard outside when he’d gone to bed tonight.

Now the night was utterly silent.

Why? What had silenced the frogs and crickets?

He listened with concentration, and then, from no more than a few feet away, was startled by a loud screeching.

Chad jumped, banging his head against the frame of the open window.

What was it?

An owl? A cat?

He turned in the direction from which the sound had come, and at first saw nothing. But then he saw something glimmering in the blackness, barely visible.

Chad’s pulse quickened as he strained to see better.

The glimmer turned to a glow, and then the glow came into focus.

Eyes.

Two darkly glowing eyes, the pupils huge, were peering at him from a branch of the tree that was just far enough away to be out of his reach.

An owl. That’s what it had to be—a screech owl! He’d imitated it better than he thought!

Chad waved his arms toward it, certain it would leap from the branch and fly away. But instead of seeing an owl burst out of the tree’s canopy in startled flight, something as black as the night outside came through the window. For a terrible instant Chad felt as if the darkness itself was reaching for him, but a fraction of a second later he knew he was wrong.

A cat!

A black cat, with a single white blaze in the middle of its chest.

Angel’s cat!

Claws that felt like acid-tipped scalpel blades suddenly slashed deep into the bare flesh of his shoulders, and teeth sank into his neck.

A scream of pain and shock choking in his throat, Chad lurched backward, tumbling to the bedroom floor. He tried to get his hands on it to tear it away from his throat before it killed him, but before he could, the cat was gone.

Gone so quickly and so completely that for several seconds Chad wondered if anything had actually happened at all. But then the pain of the cat’s claws sinking into the flesh of his shoulders began to burn, and he pressed his hands against his neck, terrified that the animal might have torn open his throat. Stumbling from his bedroom down the hall to the bathroom, he turned on the cold water and began washing his neck and shoulders even before turning the light on.

The coolness of the water soothed the burning of his wounds, and after using a washcloth to wipe most of the water away, he turned on the light and looked at his reflection in the mirror.

Nothing.

Not a cut anywhere—not even a scratch!

Then, as he stared at his image in the mirror, he saw it.

The cat’s face, its lips pulled back to show its teeth, looming behind him, just over his right shoulder.

Spinning around, Chad raised his arms to fend off the cat’s attack once more.

And again he saw nothing.

For almost a full minute he stood trembling in the bathroom, his heart racing, too terrified even to turn off the light and go back to his room.

He searched the bathroom then, even looking in the shower and behind the old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub, for any sign of the cat, but the cat had vanished even faster than it had vanished from the tree outside.

If it had been in the bathroom at all.

As his heart finally slowed back to normal, Chad told himself he couldn’t have seen anything in the mirror, that it had to have been his imagination playing tricks on him.

But what about before, when he was peering out the open window and the cat had attacked him and he’d felt the pain of its claws sinking into his flesh?

Could he have imagined that too?

How?

How had it happened?

Maybe nothing had happened.

Maybe he had imagined it all.

But when he went back to his bedroom, Chad left the light on in the bathroom, and when he went to sleep, he left the light on in his room too.

The black cat slipped through the night like a wraith, moving silently in the darkness, no sound at all betraying its presence. Rather, it was the silence itself that signaled every living thing within its reach that something was wrong.

That danger was nearby.

And sensing the danger—the presence of the wraithlike creature—every living thing took on a stillness that lay over the night like a cloak so dense that even the light breeze of the autumn night died away.

But even the cloak of silence wasn’t enough to slow the cat as it moved toward its prey, for there was nothing in the night the cat could not hear.

Nothing it could not see.

Nothing it could not sense.

After it had passed, the silence slowly lifted.

Crickets concealed beneath the bark of trees once more rubbed their wing covers together.

Tree frogs in the gardens began to puff out their throats once more.

Birds in their nests and on their perches twittered softly in their sleep.

Even the leaves dying on the trees began to rustle as the breeze in the air came back to life.

Moments later farther down the street, the black wraith slithered silently up a tree, then moved out onto a limb.

Dropped onto a steeply sloping roof.

Crept around to a gable.

Peered through the window.

Saw Jared Woods asleep in his bed.

A moment later, though Jared had left no window open, and locked his bedroom door, the cat named Houdini was inside the room.

In his dream, Jared Woods was once again in the forest near Black Creek Crossing, barely able to contain his laughter as he heard Chad Jackson hooting softly in an almost perfect imitation of an owl.

Perfect enough to send Angel Sullivan veering back across the road to the other side, where Zack Fletcher was waiting to crack twigs again.

As he watched Angel hurry her step and veer first one way and then another to escape the ominous sounds coming out of the darkness, Jared felt the same thrill that always came over him when he saw the frightened look in Seth Baker’s eyes whenever he and Chad were about to subject him to some new humiliation.

Terrifying Angel was even better, because she had no idea what was happening or who was hidden in the darkness.

Now, as she veered away from the fear of Zack’s cracking sticks and started back toward him, he readied himself, his lungs filled with air, his mouth opening.

Just when he was certain she would come no closer, Jared unleashed the scream.

Which lasted only a split second before something slammed into him.

As the scream abruptly died, Jared jerked awake, still feeling the sickening sensation of something having struck him in the stomach, knocking the breath out of him.

For a moment a wave of panic washed over him as he realized he couldn’t breathe, then his diaphragm began to function again and his lungs filled with air.

And then he felt a searing pain in his stomach, as if someone had just plunged a knife into him and was twisting it in his guts. Howling as a second stab slashed at his belly, he tried to reach for the lamp on the table beside his bed, but as a third stab struck him, his whole body went into a spasm and he tumbled from the bed, dragging the bedclothes with him.

Screaming, he thrashed at the sheet and blanket that were tangled around him, but even as he tried to free himself, he knew there was something else in the jumbled mass too.

Something that was twisting and writhing as frantically as he, but not because it wanted to escape.

It was thrashing and twisting and writhing because it wanted to kill him, and as another scream built in his throat, he felt it tear at his belly yet again.

Panic erupted inside Jared as he felt teeth and claws sinking deeper into his flesh.

He was going to die!

He was going to die right now on the floor of his own room.

Now, he could feel his limbs starting to go numb, and a strange kind of darkness—far blacker than the night—was starting to gather around him.

A nightmare!

That was it—he was having a terrible nightmare, and in a moment he would wake up.

But the nightmare went on and on, and the darkness was closing in on him, and he knew that if it finally gathered him in its folds, he would never see again.

Never breathe again.

He rolled over, still flailing to free himself from the tangle of bedding.

Then he heard a voice.

“Jared? Jared—what’s going on in there?”

His father!

The jaws at his throat were suddenly gone, and Jared sucked in a huge gulp of air. He rolled over once more and tried to stand up.

“Jared?” his father called out again.

It was as if his father’s voice had freed him from the bedding, and he pulled himself to the bed table, reached up, and switched on the lamp.

The room filled with light, and a cat—the black cat he’d seen before, weaving around Angel Sullivan’s feet and rubbing against her legs—sprang to its feet. As Jared managed to stand and started toward the door, the cat’s back arched, and it hissed menacingly and tensed as if it were about to leap at him again.

“I’m coming,” Jared called back to his father, but the pain in his torn belly was so bad he could barely get the words out. His eyes never leaving the cat, Jared backed toward the door, reaching behind him and groping for the key. His fingers closed on it, but it wouldn’t turn.

He struggled with it for a moment, terrified that if he turned his back, the cat would strike, but when the key still wouldn’t turn, he knew he had no choice. Spinning around, he twisted at the key frantically, and this time it clicked open. A second later he flung the door open.

“It’s a cat!” he cried. “It tried to kill me!”

Jared’s face was pasty white, and Steve Woods could see the terror in his son’s eyes. But as he scanned the room, he saw no sign of a cat, though the covers were pulled half off the bed, and the rag rug Steve’s grandmother had made for him when he was about Jared’s age was rumpled up the way it used to get when Steve and his friends used it for a wrestling mat. Steve scanned the room once more, then looked again at his son. “A cat? What are you talking about?”

“Over there—” Jared began as he turned to point at the spot where the cat had been crouched. But the cat had vanished.

He looked around the room, searching for the cat.

Nothing.

“There was a cat!” he insisted. “It attacked me! Look! Look at my stomach—it almost killed me!”

Steve Woods cocked his head, and a small smile played around the corners of his mouth. “Sounds to me like you had one hell of a nightmare,” he said. He began straightening out the rug with his foot. “I’m not sure I ever had one so bad I was fighting on the floor, but—”

“It wasn’t a nightmare!” Jared cried. “It was a cat!”

His father’s smile faded. “Jared, take a look around. Do you see a cat?”

Again Jared scanned the room, searching for someplace the cat might be hiding. But the closet door was closed, as was the one to the hall.

The window was closed tight as well.

Crouching down, he looked under the bed, and under his desk, and behind the chair, and anyplace else the cat might be hiding.

It had vanished so completely it might as well never have been there at all.

Then, as he rose to his feet again, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on his closet door.

There wasn’t a mark on his stomach, or anywhere else.

It was as if none of it had happened.

But it had.

He knew it had.

And he knew whose cat it was that had attacked him . . .

Chapter 26

HE TERROR ANGEL HAD FELT AS SHE WALKED HOME
from the library the night before gave way to anger in the morning sunlight, with the shadows of the forest washed away and Houdini frolicking around her feet, dashing away every now and then to chase a squirrel or a rabbit, but always coming back before more than a minute or two had passed.