Ticktock (15 page)

When Tommy was at four, Del said, “What're you doing?”

“Counting to ten.”

“Why?”

“To calm down.”

“What number are you at?”

“Six.”

“What number now?”

“Seven.”

“What number now?”

“Eight.”

When he opened his eyes, she was still smiling. “I
do
excite you, don't I?”

“You
scare
me.”

“Why scare?”

“Because how are we going to manage to keep this supernatural
thing
from killing us if you keep acting this way?”

“What way?”

He took a deep breath, started to speak, decided there was no adequate reply, exhaled explosively, and said only, “Have you ever been in an institution?”

“Does the post office count?”

Muttering a curse in Vietnamese, the first words he had spoken in that language in at least twenty years, Tommy pushed open the metal door. He stepped into the skirling wind and the rain—and he immediately regretted doing so. In the bakery heat, he had gotten warm for the first time since scrambling out of the wrecked Corvette, and his clothes had begun to dry. Now he was instantly chilled to the marrow once more.

Del followed him into the storm, as ebullient as any child. “Hey, did you ever see Gene Kelly in
Singin' in the Rain?
”

“Don't start dancing,” he warned.

“You need to be more spontaneous, Tommy.”

“I'm very spontaneous,” he said, tucking his head down to keep the rain out of his eyes. He bent into the wind and headed toward the battered, mural-bright van, which stood under a tall lamppost.

“You're about as spontaneous as a rock.”

Splashing through ankle-deep puddles, shivering, poised on the slippery slope of self-pity, he didn't bother to answer.

“Tommy, wait,” she said, and grabbed his arm again.

Spinning to face her, cold and wet and impatient, he demanded, “Now what?”

“It's here.”

“Huh?”

No longer flirtatious or flippant, as alert as a deer scenting a wolf in the underbrush, she stared past Tommy:
“It.”

He followed the direction of her gaze. “Where?”

“In the van. Waiting for us in the van.”

FIVE

Oil-black rain briefly blazed as bright as molten gold, down through lamplight, drizzled over the van, and then puddled black again around the tires.

“Where?” Tommy asked, blinking rain out of his eyes, studying the murkiness beyond the van's windshield, searching for some sign of the demon. “I don't see it.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “But it's there, all right, in the van. I sense it.”

“You're psychic all of a sudden?”

“Not all of a sudden,” she said, her voice thickening, as though sleep was overcoming her. “I've always had strong intuition, very reliable.”

Thirty feet away, the Ford van was exactly as it had been when they left it to go into the bakery. Tommy didn't feel what Del felt. He perceived no sinister aura around the vehicle.

He looked at Del as she stared intently at the van. Rain streamed down her face, dripped off the end of her nose and the point of her chin. Her eyes weren't blinking, and she seemed to be sinking into a trance. Her lips began to move, as though she were speaking, but no sound escaped her.

“Del?”

After a moment her silently moving lips produced a wordless murmur, and then she began to whisper: “Waiting…cold as ice…dark inside…a dark cold thing…ticktock…ticktock…”

He shifted his attention to the van again, and now it seemed to loom as ominously as a hearse. Del's fear had infected him, and his heart raced as he was overwhelmed by a sense of impending assault.

The woman's whisper faded into the susurration of the raindrops dissolving against the puddled pavement. Tommy leaned closer. Her voice was hypnotically portentous, and he didn't want to miss anything that she said.

“…ticktock…so much bigger now…snake's blood and river mud…blind eyes see…dead heart beats…a need…a need…a need to feed…”

Tommy wasn't sure which frightened him more at the moment: the van and the utterly alien creature that might be crouching within it—or this peculiar woman.

Abruptly she emerged from her mesmeric state. “We have to get out of here. Let's take one of these cars.”

“An employee's car?”

She was already moving away from the van, among the more than thirty vehicles that belonged to the workers at New World Saigon Bakery.

Glancing warily back at the van, Tommy hurried to keep up with her. “We can't do that.”

“Sure we can.”

“It's stealing.”

“It's survival,” she said, trying the door of a blue Chevrolet, which was locked.

“Let's go back into the bakery.”

“The deadline is dawn, remember?” she said, moving on to a white Honda. “It won't wait forever. It'll come in after us.”

She opened the driver's door of the Honda, and the dome light came on, and she slipped in behind the steering wheel. No keys dangled in the ignition, so she searched under the seat with one hand to see if the owner had left them there.

Standing at the open door of the Honda, Tommy said, “Then let's just walk out of here.”

“We wouldn't get far on foot before it caught us. I'm going to have to hot-wire this crate.”

Watching as Del groped blindly for the ignition wires under the dashboard, Tommy said, “You can't do this.”

“Keep a watch on my Ford.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “What am I looking for?”

“Movement, a strange shadow, anything,” she said nervously. “We're running out of time. Don't you sense it?”

Except for the wind-driven rain, the night was still around Del's van.

“Come on, come on,” Del muttered to herself, fumbling with the wires, and then the Honda engine caught, revved.

Tommy's stomach turned over at the sound, for he seemed to be sliding ever faster down a greased slope to destruction—if not at the hands of the demon, then by his own actions.

“Hurry, get in,” Del said as she released the handbrake.

“This is car theft,” he argued.

“I'm leaving whether you get in or not.”

“We could go to jail.”

She pulled the driver's door shut, forcing him to step back, out of the way.

Under the tall sodium-vapor lamp, the silent van appeared to be deserted. All the doors remained closed. The most remarkable thing about it was the Art Deco mural. Already its ominous aura had faded.

Tommy had allowed himself to be infected by Del's hysteria. The thing to do now was get control of himself, walk over to the van, and show her that it was safe.

Del put the Honda in gear and drove forward.

Quickly stepping in front of the car, slapping his palms down flat on the hood, Tommy blocked her way, forcing her to stop. “No. Wait, wait.”

She shifted into reverse and started to back out of the parking space.

Tommy ran around to the passenger's side, caught up with the car, pulled open the door, and jumped inside. “Will you just wait a second, for God's sake?”

“No,” she said, braking and shifting out of reverse.

As she tramped the accelerator, the car shot forward across the parking lot, and the door beside Tommy was flung shut.

They were briefly blinded by the rain until Del found the switch for the windshield wipers.

“You're not thinking this through,” he argued.

“I know what I'm doing.”

The engine screamed, and great plumes of water sprayed up from the tires.

“What if the cops stop us?” Tommy worried.

“They won't.”

“They will if you keep driving like this.”

At the end of the large building, before turning the corner, Del braked hard. The car shrieked, fishtailing as it slid to a full stop.

Studying her rearview mirror, she said, “Look back.”

Tommy turned in his seat. “What?”

“The van.”

Under the tall lamppost, falling rain danced on empty pavement.

For a moment Tommy thought he was looking in the wrong place. There were three other lampposts behind the bakery. But the van was not under any of those, either.

“Where'd it go?” he asked.

“Maybe out to the alley, or maybe around the other side of the building, or maybe it's just behind those delivery trucks. I can't figure why it didn't come straight after us.”

She drove forward, around the corner, along the side of the bakery, toward the front.

Bewildered, Tommy said, “But who's driving it?”

“Not a who. A what.”

“That's ridiculous,” he said.

“It's a lot bigger now.”

“It would have to be. But still—”

“It's changed.”

“And it got a driver's license, huh?”

“It's very different from what you've seen before.”

“Yeah? What's it like now?”

“I don't know. I didn't see it.”

“Intuition again?”

“Yeah. I just know…it's different.”

Tommy tried to envision a monstrous entity, something like one of the ancient gods from an old H. P. Love-craft story, with a bulbous skull, a series of mean little scarlet eyes across its forehead, a sucking hole where the nose should be, and a wicked mouth surrounded by a ring of writhing tentacles, comfortably ensconced behind the steering wheel of the van, fumbling with a clumsy tentacle at the heater controls, punching the radio selector buttons in search of some old-fashioned rock-'n'-roll, and checking the glove box to see if it could find any breath mints.

“Ridiculous,” he repeated.

“Better belt up,” she said. “We might be in for a bumpy ride.”

As Tommy buckled the safety harness across his chest, Del drove speedily but warily from the shadow of the bakery and across the front parking lot. Clearly, she expected the Art Deco van to bullet out of the night and crash into them.

A debris-clogged storm drain had allowed a small lake to form at the exit from the lot. Leaves and paper litter swirled across the choppy surface.

Del slowed and turned right into the street, through the dirty water. Theirs was the only vehicle in sight.

“Where did it go?” Del Payne wondered. “Why the hell isn't it following us?”

Tommy checked his luminous wristwatch. Eleven minutes after one o'clock.

Del said, “I don't like this.”

Ticktock.

         

Half a mile from the New World Saigon Bakery, in the stolen Honda, Tommy broke a three-block silence. “Where did you learn to hot-wire a car?”

“My mom taught me.”

“Your mom.”

“She's cool.”

“The one who likes speed, races stock cars and motorcycles.”

“Yep. That's the one. The only mom I've got.”

“What is she—a getaway driver for the mob?”

“In her youth, she was a ballet dancer.”

“Of course. All ballet dancers can hot-wire a car.”

“Not all of them,” Del disagreed.

“After she was a ballet dancer…?”

“She married Daddy.”

“And what does he do?”

Checking the rearview mirror for any sign of a pursuer, Del said, “Daddy plays poker with the angels.”

“You're losing me again.”

“He died when I was ten.”

Tommy regretted the sarcastic tone he had adopted. He felt coarse and insensitive. Chastened, he said, “I'm sorry. That's tough. Only ten.”

“Mom shot him.”

Numbly, he said, “Your mother the ballerina.”

“Ex-ballerina by then.”

“She shot him?”

“Well, he asked her to.”

Tommy nodded, feeling stupid for having regretted his sarcasm. He slipped comfortably back into it: “Of course he did.”

“She couldn't refuse.”

“It's a marital obligation in your religion, is it? To kill one's spouse upon request?”

“He was dying of cancer,” Del said.

Tommy felt chastened again. “Jesus, I'm sorry.”

“Pancreatic cancer, one of the most vicious.”

“You poor kid.”

They were no longer in an industrial district. The broad avenue was lined with commercial enterprises. Beauty salons. Video stores. Discount electronics and discount furniture and discount glassware stores. Except for an occasional 7-Eleven or twenty-four-hour coffee shop, the businesses were closed and dark.

Del said, “When the pain got so bad Daddy couldn't concentrate on the cards any more, he was ready to go. He loved cards, and without them he just didn't feel he had any purpose.”

“Cards?”

“I told you—Daddy was a professional poker player.”

“No, you said he now plays poker with the angels.”

“Well, why would he be playing poker with them if he wasn't a professional poker player?”

“Point taken,” Tommy said, because sometimes he was smart enough to know when he had been defeated.

“Daddy traveled all over the country, playing in high-stakes games, most illegal, though he played a lot of legal games in Vegas too. In fact, he twice won the World Championship of Poker. Mom and I went with him everywhere, so by the time I was ten, I'd seen most of this country three times or more.”

Wishing he could just keep his mouth shut but too fascinated to resist, Tommy said, “So your mother shot him, huh?”

“He was in the hospital, pretty bad by then, and he knew he was never getting out.”

“She shot him right there in the hospital?”

“She put the muzzle of the gun against his chest, positioned it very carefully right over his heart, and Daddy told her he loved her more than any man had ever loved a woman before, and she said she loved him and would see him on the Other Side, and then she pulled the trigger, and he died instantly.”

Aghast, Tommy said, “You weren't there at the time, were you?”

“Heavens, no. What kind of person do you think Mom is? She'd never have put me through something like that.”

“I'm sorry. I should have—”

“She told me all about it an hour later, before the cops came by the house to arrest her, and she gave me the expended cartridge from the round that killed him.”

Del reached inside her wet uniform blouse and fished out a gold chain. The pendant suspended at the end of the chain was an empty brass shell casing.

“When I hold this,” Del said, wrapping her hand around the shell casing, “I can feel the love—the
incredible
love—they had for each other. Isn't it the most romantic thing ever?”

“Ever,” Tommy said.

She sighed and tucked the pendant inside her blouse once more. “If only Daddy hadn't gotten cancer until I was closer to puberty, then he wouldn't have had to die.”

For a while Tommy struggled to understand that one, but at last he said, “Puberty?”

“Well, it wasn't to be. Fate is fate,” she said cryptically.

Half a block ahead of them, on the far side of the wide street, a police cruiser was just starting to turn out of the westbound lane into the parking lot at an all-night diner.