Your Number (3 page)

4.

Kate didn’t like the looks of the building the second she laid eyes on it. Graffiti-infested, paint chipping, tucked behind a strip mall like a bum in an alley. She checked the address, then checked it again. 500 South Alameda. This was the place. She smelled urine and wanted to walk right then and there. Then desperation took over, forced her to go on. She had to know more about the death number, and, supposedly, this was where the best psychic in all of California lived. She didn’t believe it. The homeless sleeping in the street, the rundown cars. It looked more like a place where she’d find rats and syphilis, not a renowned clairvoyant.

She stepped past piles of maggoty trash, bikes with twisted, flat tires, and discarded wine bottles, and located Number Six. A knock on the door produced nothing. She heard a TV inside, blaring some kind of game show, a contestant squealing, an announcer declaring her victory. She knocked again, louder, and the TV fell silent. Then the door cracked open and a tiny eye peeped at her. The deepest, brownest eye Kate had ever seen.

“Is your mamma home, sweetie?”

The door opened a little more. Kate saw the child’s entire face, and it shocked her. The whole right side of the girl’s body was scarred heavily, in some places to the point of being grotesque.

“Who is it, Sunshine?” a woman bellowed from somewhere in the back of the apartment, a sparsely decorated place bursting with packed cardboard boxes. “Who’s there?” the woman had an uneasiness in her voice, as if she was in a great deal of pain.

“I’m K—” she stopped herself, unwilling to say her own name out loud. “I was told to come here…by Dean Bow.”

“We’re not doing any more readings! For anybody! I don’t care how famous you are, or how much money you have! Just go! Leave us alone!”

“Please, ma’am. I need your help. My friend was killed by some curse, a curse on his name…the death number!”

The girl took Kate’s hand and tugged her inside, putting her finger to her lips and telling her silently to be quiet.

“Sunshine? What are you doin’? I told you
no
! Don’t you help that woman!”

The girl smiled in brazen disregard to her mother’s vehement wishes. Kate argued with herself over the child’s age. Ten? Twelve? She hunched her shoulders and sorted through a shabby, antique trunk, finding an ornate yet ragged trinket made of feathers and teeth and bone.

“Sunshine!” yelled the woman. Kate got the feeling the lady couldn’t move. She pictured a bedridden soul, sentenced to a miserable, slow, living death. “Baby, please! Don’t do this! Mamma’s begging you, child! You can’t do this! Not again! You’ll kill me! Honey, you don’t understand how much it takes out of your mamma!”

“Is…is she okay?” Kate sat on the floor.

“Mamma’s okay. But you’re not,” the girl placed her charm on the trunk lid and stared at it. The thing looked like a Native American dreamcatcher, only it had a distinct African vibe. Carved animal faces, richly-colored fabrics, exotic plumage.

The woman moaned stridently, rattling Kate’s molars. Kate felt a freezing wind, only it was inside, beneath her skin. The girl seized the charm and shook it hard while the woman cried out in terror.

“NO! Go away! No! Sunshine! Make them go away!”

Kate uncrossed her legs and stood up fast. She ran to the hall and peered down. Two doors, both on the right. She knew the bedroom was the furthest, but didn’t want to go. She had to do something, so she took a nervous breath and started toward the bedroom when Sunshine grasped her hand.

“Stop! Don’t go in there!”

“I have to! Your mother’s in trouble! Can’t you hear?”

Kate grabbed the doorknob and her palm scorched instantly. Not from heat, but cold. Severe cold, so bad it gave her instant freezer burn. The woman cried something, her words slurred, her speech unintelligible. Kate had precious little time. She wrapped her hand in her shirtsleeve and tried again, this time managing to twist the knob and force her weight into the door, opening the pathway into hell. That’s what it looked like. Kate halted, every vein in her body turning to ice at the sight of dozens of dark little monsters clinging to the walls, darting across the ceiling, dangling from the curtains, crowding the floor.

The heaviest concentration of the malicious beasties was on the queen-sized bed, where, laying with her arms crossed over her chest, was a rotund woman. The monsters had her pinned, clinging to the mattress with their claws. Others crawled over her like parasites, gnashing their enormous and fanged beaks, drooling a thick, gelatinous ooze.

“Oh my God!” Kate screamed, then covered her own mouth when, all at once, each of the tiny creatures turned its attention toward her. A roomful of eyes, glowing yellowish-red, staring, pupils widening into fiery circles. One of the slithering, filthy vermin raised its slovenly skull and let loose a hungry roar. The others, in a macabre chorus, joined it, raising the cacophony to a fever pitch.

Sunshine walked past Kate, and the scraggly, demonic pests squirmed away like cockroaches in the light. Scurrying to the nearest corner, they congregated and cowered and squealed anxiously as Sunshine held up her amulet, swaying it side to side, and humming a little happy tune Kate knew she’d heard before.

“Good girl, Sunshine,” her mother panted. “Tell the bad things to go. Tell them all to go back to where they belong and leave your mamma alone.”

Sunshine walked to every corner of the room, humming and singing, smiling and giggling, as each and every one of the tiny monsters struggled and writhed in place. Popping and snapping little tumors rose from their skin, bubbling and boiling until they looked like lumps of shapeless tissue. Then they vanished in puffs of dust, and the room was silent and still. No more evil little monsters, bent on savage murder.

Kate fought to catch her breath, watching the beautifully scarred girl scurry to the bed and lay her hand over her mother’s forehead.

“Mamma, you’ll be fine,” Sunshine stroked her arm, but the lady would have nothing of it.

“You get out of here!” she pointed at Kate, her fingernail chewed to the nub.

“Mamma, I can help her,” Sunshine pleaded.

“No! She’s brought us enough trouble. They all have. We don’t do anymore readings for actors or writers or musicians. You especially,” she looked Kate directly in the eye with a bloodshot stare. “Your number. It’s almost up, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“
I
can do something, Mamma,” Sunshine sounded confident. “I can help her.”

“I said no!” she sat up, coughing into a handkerchief. Then she screamed the loudest yet. “Get OUT!” Kate backed away. “We don’t want you! We keep moving so you people won’t find us…but you keep finding us! Now get out before I call the police! GET OUT!”

5.

Kate never watched much TV, but she needed to unwind and take her mind off everything. It all seemed so unreal, she considered the extreme possibility it had been a figment of her own imagination, her subconscious, desperate for an explanation to Charlie’s otherwise unexplainable death.

She flicked on the set, and immediately wished she’d left the remote alone. The giant screen came alight with her sister’s likeness, complete with a headline about her stormy departure from Charlie’s funeral.

“Oh my God,” she realized the implications. People, talking about Eva, saying her name aloud, bringing her closer to the death number. Then Kate saw her own name on TV, along with video of her entering Forest Lawn Memorial Park. She hated the paparazzi now more than ever.

She hit the mute button on the remote and the TV went silent. The whole place went silent. Then her backbone erupted in ice pellets at a sound coming from the other side of the apartment.

She sat straight. Her guest bedroom, the one where Charlie had been killed—something, someone was in there. Talking. Kate didn’t know what was being said, but, as she got closer, clinging to the walls and inching toward the guestroom door, she recognized one voice over the general din of a large, yet subdued gathering. Charlie.

“Charlie?” she flung open the door. Could it be? Was it all a horrible fantasy, and her best friend was still alive, in her guest bed, calling for her? “Charlie!”

But when she stepped inside, she didn’t see her Nourison Persian rug, her Reilly-Chance window treatments and matching bedspread, her Louis XVI vanity, or her 18th century Bordeaux armoire. Instead, she saw the entrance to a majestic cathedral with high, vaulted ceilings and rows upon rows of pews, occupied to full capacity, by people wearing black gowns and suits, all heads pointed to the floor.

The door slammed closed behind her. Quite on instinct, she tried retreating to her apartment, back to some semblance of sanity. The organ music, somber and slow, beckoned her nearer, awakening inside an involuntary need to obey. Step by step she went, up the center aisle, past the dozens of mourners, sitting in silence.

She looked closer at the faces. Those faces. She identified many of them. Patrick Swayze…Jim Morrison…River Phoenix…Brandon Lee. Then, as she neared the first row, she saw Charlie, his expression quiet, restrained.

“Charlie?” she found a place in his welcoming arms. He embraced her, but remained wordless. “Aren’t you happy to see me?” she stared. His eyes were unresponsive. He didn’t look at her. His attention, like everyone else’s, was fixed straight ahead, at the coffin.

With the split lid open, the body lying in repose was visible from the waist up. Although she didn’t want to look, the closer she got, the more curious she became. She lost her breath when she saw a red silk gown, one she owned. Then she saw the face.
Her
face.
Her
hair. It was
Kate!

She stumbled back. Before she fell, two strong hands held her tight against an even stronger chest. She knew Charlie’s powerful build anywhere.

“Kate,” he said. “Kate, your number…your number is coming. Don’t let them get you, too,” he allowed his eyes to cover the vast audience, the celebrities taken before their times. “Like they got us,” he stared at her again. “Kate, you have to break the cycle. You have to stop them.”

“But-but how? How am I supposed to stop those things? They’re so scary.”

“You
have
to,” he squeezed her shoulders. “Watch for the sign, Kate. The sign. Don’t let them get you—”

He threw his attention over her shoulder. She looked, and her whole body seized in terror. The aisle was black with the scraggly, wrinkled, horn-billed creatures, their menacing claws digging at the stone floor, the cathedral echoing with dreadful screeches, the shrill cries of conquest.

People in the back rows stirred into a panic. Bench to Bench, the horror spread, and the church became a madhouse of stampeding people and shrieking, scurrying vermin with glowing eyes.

Charlie took Kate’s hand and ran, forcing her to follow. The panic-stricken souls sounded tormented. She heard snapping and gnashing, sharp beaks clacking and clicking, talons like razors digging into flesh, severing arteries, breaking bones. She sensed this was once a place of refuge from this torment, and now it had been tainted, its location discovered, its walls breached. Charlie and Kate reached a doorway behind the altar, just in time for the biggest shock.

The whole building—walls, floor, ceiling—reverberated with a low, menacing tone. Kate held her hands over her ears, but that did no good. The sound penetrated her, inside and out. She glanced behind Charlie, toward the main entrance. There she saw the unholiest of unholies.

Shrouded in a dark mist, it pushed inside the church, its multiple legs, bent and skinny and lanky, stepping in rapid succession, so fast it seemed simultaneous. The giant thing had so many legs, she couldn’t decide if it was more like a spider or a centipede. It ran a rampage through the horrified gathering, snatching up several individuals with its multiple limbs, each person crying in agony. Endless agony.

“Go!” Charlie opened the backdoor, the secret passageway out. She didn’t want to leave. The freakish insect set its smoldering sights on Charlie, and she shuddered at the thought of what it would do to him.

“No!” she snatched at his hands, but he forced her to let go, letting her fall on her back. She expected a hard landing, outside, in some dirty alley. What she got surprised her even more. The soft, down comforter on her guest bed.