Valknut: The Binding (24 page)

“Who’s out there?” Bill called in a stern
voice. He motioned Junkyard and Lennie to the back of the tent.

The blade paused for a heartbeat. “Let us in
and find out.”

The voices laughed and the knife slid once
more across the tie, parting it. Junkyard dropped silently to the
ground, pulling Lennie down with him. Wind battered the walls,
widening the gap in the door. Arms crossed, Bill stepped in front
of it to block the view.

“Hello, Ragman. You don’t need to slice up my
tent. If you want in from the storm, all you gotta do is ask.”

“
Lo siento
, Bill. We didn’t know it
was yours,” the Ragman said, but he didn’t sound apologetic. “We
were jus’ looking for two 
amigos
, 
si
?
A 
gringo 
with sideburns and a skinny woman with
wild hair.”

“Friends of yours?” Thunder rolled, almost
obscuring Bill’s voice. “From the description, I’d say they don’t
sound like your type.”

“Me and my 
compadres
, we like all
types.”

The gangbangers laughed. Not a pleasant
sound. Lennie wanted out. Now. Carefully, quietly, she sidled to
the back wall. Junkyard did the same.

“Tell me, 
mi amigo
.” The Ragman’s
voice turned hard and humorless. The knife went to work on the next
set of ties. “Do you know where they are?”

“Now stop that.” Bill sounded genuinely
irritated. “Don’t you know how to untie knots, boy? Here, let me do
that.”

Bill went to work on the double knot, still
blocking the gangbangers’ view of the interior. The wind struck
again, hard, and the tent shuddered violently. Under the cover of
flapping canvas, Junkyard lifted the back wall and they rolled
through the opening. The wall dropped closed behind them, muffling
Bill’s voice.

“Now, do you see? No one in here but me.”

Rain splattered down. Lennie pushed to her
feet and tried to look in all directions at once. The gangbangers
hadn’t thought to send someone to check the back of the tent. But
she felt as if the very shadows were watching her.

“Carnival,” Junkyard whispered, and Lennie
forced her stiffening legs to move.

The storm was almost on them. Carnival music
blasted at full volume, but the rides had shut down and the few
remaining customers were heading for their cars before the sky
truly opened. Lightning flashed overhead, followed seconds later by
a loud rumble. Lennie ran, half-expecting to hear gunshots at their
backs, but there was nothing—no angry shouts, no firecracker
pop—just carnival noise and the rush of wind. She slowed and
trotted backward to check for pursuit. The lot between them and the
tent village was empty.

Then she looked up.

Shadow billowed above the tents like black
smoke against the night-darkened clouds. But where smoke would
dissipate in the wind, this shadow reached across the parking lot,
an oily black snake driving all its malevolence onto the single
point that was Lennie.

She stumbled backward, barely keeping to her
feet. Pressure swelled in her head, like the morning’s attack, only
faster and stronger. Her tattooed hand began to burn and the hairs
lifted on her arm. A memory arose in her mind, blocking the storm,
the parking lot, even blocking the music from the carnival. She saw
her mother lying in a puddle of vomit, unconscious and not
breathing. She tried to push the memory away, but the images came
anyway, their edges bleeding into yellow haze.

The smell had been the worst. Stale beer and
bile. She had opened the front door to it after school on her
thirteenth birthday and had wanted to run away without stepping
inside, pretending not to see her mother on the floor. But her
father had been the one to run out, not Lennie. So she dropped her
book bag and addressed the situation as though following a
checklist: 1) call 911, 2) clean out victim’s mouth, 3) administer
CPR.

When her mother coughed back to life, Lennie
found a blanket to keep her warm until the ambulance came. Just
another day at the Cook’s residence.

But had it really happened that way? She had
found her mother passed out many times, but had she ever stopped
breathing? Had it ever happened on Lennie’s birthday?

Real or not, the memory was now hers.
Forever.

Electric fire surged in her tattooed hand,
clearing her head for a moment. But the pressure returned, worse
than before. A new image came—her father’s face, sneering and ugly
in the thickening yellow haze. She wanted to claw at the face, tear
it away...

Instinctively, she focused on the burning
tattoo. A prickling radiated from her hand with an almost audible
hum. Her fingers convulsed, but she forced them to spread. The
charge built along her lifeline, throbbing, threatening to split
the skin. She could feel its power, could sense the potential, but
had no idea what to do with it.

Above her head, the shadow recoiled as though
sensing her efforts. She thrust her palm toward it, fingers
splayed. She could almost picture what she needed to do.

Then Junkyard was there, pulling on her arm.
“What’re you doing, Lennie? They’ll see us.”

She yanked her arm free and desperately tried
to regain her focus, but the charge faded, leaving her hand cold
and numb. “Damn it!”

Still breathing hard, Junkyard scanned the
parking lot. “What’s wrong? Did you see them?”

She looked at him, incredulous. “What do you
mean? Can’t you see it?”

“See what?” He pulled the bandana from his
hair and wiped his face with it. He looked younger, more vulnerable
without it. “Lennie, we have to go.”

“There.” She pointed into the sky above
Bill’s tent and watched Junkyard’s reaction. His gaze trailed
upward, but he looked puzzled. Lennie looked past her
still-pointing finger and saw only the ordinary matte black of a
stormy night sky. She let her hand drop.

“Never mind.”

She rubbed her tattoo like a talisman, the
one solid piece of evidence that she wasn’t hallucinating. Maybe
she should tell Junkyard about the mental attacks, the tattoo,
everything. If all of it was real, he should be warned. If it
wasn’t, if she was crazy, well, maybe he should be warned about
that, too.

“Uh, Junkyard?” She hesitated. What approach
would make her sound the least insane? “I’ve been—”

“Can it wait? We’re vulnerable here. Not
enough people around.”

As if to punctuate his statement, the loud
music cut out, leaving them in sudden, ominous silence. The shadows
seemed to press closer, as if listening to their plans. Junkyard
must have felt it, too. He started walking fast enough that Lennie
had to trot to keep up. He kept his voice low when he spoke again.
“Let’s get to the poetry reading. Some of those ’bos are pretty
tough. The ‘bangers won’t want to tangle with them.”

“Uh, sure. But—”

“Besides, I’m a little worried. Jim was
supposed to be with Bill. If he’s not at the poetry reading—”

Lightning crashed overhead, so close that
there was no lag before the thunder. The sky opened and water came
down in wind-blown waves. Junkyard took off at a trot. Frustrated,
Lennie followed.

Chapter 14

Running again. This time, through a wall of
rain. Lennie wiped at the water streaming down her face and tried
not to think about how tired she was. Junkyard seemed ready to run
all night, but she was a sprinter, not a marathoner.

Lightning tore the clouds to the north, then
again to the south. Thunder rolled across the sky. She cringed,
feeling exposed.

“The gods are going bowling,” she murmured,
feeling a little delirious. Her father used to say that during
storms. Another flash blinded her for a moment, followed by a sharp
crack. She ducked, her nerves crackling in response. 
The
gods are going bowling, bowling, bowling.
She hated
thunderstorms.

“This is...just a little...dangerous.” She
didn’t have enough air left to infuse irony into the statement.

Junkyard only grunted and slogged through
another puddle. His ponytail had fallen out and the hair-band,
knotted at the end of a thin lock, bounced on his shoulder as he
ran. Her own hair clung to her neck in wet strings, and her canvas
shoes flopped and squished with each step. She hoped the poetry
reading was someplace that had a roof. And central heating.

Junkyard slowed when he reached East River
Parkway and stopped to study the steep embankment below. A faint
odor of dead fish wafted up from the river and mixed with the wormy
smell of rain on pavement. Cones of rain-muted light radiated from
the streetlights, deepening the surrounding shadow. Lennie leaned
over the guardrail. In the weak light, the tangled, leafy mass
lining the slope below might have been shrubbery or the tops of
tall trees.

“What are we looking for?”

Junkyard answered without turning. “A path.
It leads down to an abandoned boathouse.”

“A b-boathouse?” So much for central heating.
The old letter jacket had kept Lennie’s arms and torso mostly dry,
but her rain-soaked jeans chafed like sandpaper across her thighs
and her teeth had started to chatter.

“Hobos’ve been using it for decades, though
not so much anymore. In the old days, there might’ve been fifteen,
twenty ’bos looking for a place to stay on a night like this. The
boathouse was big enough to hold ’em, and the river was handy for
cooking and washing. Now, they’d rather jungle up closer to the
track than go all the way down to the river. But it’s perfect for
the annual poetry reading.”

Junkyard paused as a lone man crossed into
the halo of a streetlight. Lennie tensed until she saw that the man
wore a cowboy hat and gray coveralls stretched over a large gut. No
gangbanger could survive looking like that. Hitching up the legs of
his overalls, he climbed over the guardrail and disappeared down
the embankment.

“Ah, that must be the path.” Junkyard started
toward the spot as two more people stepped into the light. They saw
him and waved before following the first man over the side.
Junkyard waved back. “The fellow with the forked beard and yellow
slicker is old Slim Dandy. Thinks he’s the next Pete Seegar. He’ll
probably sing something at the poetry reading.” He swung a leg over
the guardrail. “Careful, this mud is slippery.”

Lennie hesitated, uncertain what she was
getting herself into. Attending a poetry reading had seemed
reasonable enough in the daylight, when Jungle Jim had suggested
it. But going to a secluded, abandoned building with a bunch of
rough men she didn’t know wasn’t so appealing.

Still, she knew what the
gangbangers would do if they caught her. And the poetry reading was
her best chance to find out something more about her father.
Besides, where else could she go? Exhausted, teeth chattering, she
forced her stiff legs to move. Maybe there’d be some coffee boiling
over a campfire, like in the movies.

Before she could follow Junkyard over the
rail, she heard the scrape of feet on pavement. She looked around,
expecting to see another hobo heading for the boathouse.

The street was empty.

But the footsteps continued, and the jingle
of coins joined the
cadence—shuffle-jingle-shuffle...shuffle-jingle-shuffle. A lot of
coins. Someone had deep pockets.

Lennie stood transfixed, caught by the
rhythmic duet. Slow and steady, shuffle, jingle, shuffle,
Frankenstein’s monster out for an evening stroll.

“Junkyard?” she whispered, but he had
disappeared down the trail. She peered into the shadows. Did
monsters carry pocket change?

A form distilled out of the mist, dark and
undefined at the rim of the streetlight’s world. Another sound
joined the cadence, like the faint, steady clicking of squirrel’s
teeth on a walnut shell. The figure stepped closer and the
streetlight unveiled an incongruous straw hat with a full bouquet
of artificial flowers clumped on one side.

The obscured figure became a short, fat old
woman laboring down the sidewalk in three layers of mismatched
flower-print dress. Shuffle-jingle—the shuffle from an ancient
pair of snowmobile boots, the jingle from a luggage-sized purse
hanging from the crook of her elbow. Knitting needles clutched in
her knobby-knuckled hands clicked at green wool like chopsticks
fighting over spinach noodles.

Lennie exhaled. Muscles she had unknowingly
clenched ached as she allowed herself to relax. No monster, no
mummy, not even a gangbanger. Just a little old bag lady. Who had
caught her staring.

The woman stopped in front of her, so close
that Lennie could see the dirt imbedded in the straw weave of her
hat. An odor wafted from her, strong but not unpleasant, like damp
moss growing at the foot of a tree. Small, bright eyes met Lennie’s
out of a wrinkled face. Lennie wanted to look away, but she could
hardly pretend she hadn’t noticed a person two feet away on an
otherwise empty street.

The corners of the bag lady’s eyes crinkled
at Lennie’s discomfort. She spoke in a cheery grandmother voice.
“Can you spare some change for a hungry old lady?”

The bag lady ran her fingers down a length of
green yarn. A shiver ran down Lennie’s spine.

“I’m sorry,” Lennie said with an apologetic
smile. “I don’t even have fifty cents to call my mother for a
ride.”

Lennie’s voice caught as she realized what
she was saying. It was only an expression, a way of saying “I have
no money for you,” but it hurt nonetheless. Her smile tightened
against sudden tears.

“Oh, dear. That won’t do.” The woman fussed
at her purse’s latch. “I think I can spare some change
for 
you
.”

The purse’s hinged mouth sprang open,
spitting coins to the ground. Distressed, the bag lady put a hand
to her mouth. “Oh, my!”

Her eyes darted to follow the bouncing and
rolling money. When the last coin settled, she lowered herself to
her knees, leaving the purse open at Lennie’s feet. It was filled
to the top with coins: copper and silver, large and small. Spare
change, indeed. The purse must weigh at least thirty pounds.