One-Eyed Jack by Lawrence Watt-Evans Read Free Book Online

another part of the “everything” I see. It’s a
little hard to explain how I recognize them; it’s not an aura or
anything like that. Instead, they have a sort of otherness , as if they
aren’t quite part of the natural world; it looks almost as if they
were photoshopped into our reality, rather than belonging in it,
and whoever did it didn’t get it exactly right. They just don’t
quite fit with their surroundings.
    Some of them have it more than others.
Mrs. Reinholt had looked like a bad cut-and-paste job where no one
had tried to match the light – she was always brighter than the
world around her, never fitting in.
    Mel doesn’t have it, despite the
curse. Her wrongness is completely different, more like darkness
seeping out into her surroundings.
    One funny thing is that it doesn’t
show in my dreams; if any of the Wilsons or the cops or doctors or
social workers were psychic, I didn’t know about it yet.
    And another peculiar feature of my
talent was that the supernatural creatures themselves don’t have
that oddness, even though most of them can see one another. Most of
them are pretty clearly not human anyway, though. The thin woman
might have passed for human under the right circumstances, but most
of them, no.
    Go away .
    “ Why?” I repeated. “Aren’t
you lonely out here? Wouldn’t you like someone to talk
to?”
    Go away .
    It didn’t seem to be interested in
conversation, or at least, not in talking about itself, or about
me. Well, I thought I knew a subject that would get its
attention.
    “ If you’re waiting for
Jack,” I said, “they’re releasing him in the morning.”
    It seemed suddenly
attentive. Jack?
    “ Yes.”
    Jack is coming back to
me?
    “ Jack is
coming home tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t know if he’ll want anything
more to do with you , though. After
all...”
    I was interrupted by the sound of a
storm door latch; the front door of the nearest house, the last
house on the left, was open, and a fiftyish woman was staring out
at me.
    “ After all,” I finished, a
little more quietly, “aren’t you the one who bit his finger off?” I
realized I had been almost shouting.
    “ Who are you talking to,
Mister?” the woman called from the door.
    “ No one, Ma’am,” I
answered. “Just practicing lines.”
    She stared at me thoughtfully for a
moment, and moved her hands enough to let me see that she was
holding a long gun behind the skirt of her house-dress – a shotgun
by the look of it, but I’m not an expert. It might have been a
rifle of some kind.
    “ Well, go do it somewhere
else,” she said.
    “ I just wanted somewhere
quiet,” I said.
    “ Well, we like it quiet
around here,” she said, pulling the gun out of concealment and
holding it across her chest, “and that means we don’t like
strangers shouting to themselves on the sidewalk.”
    It only had one barrel, but it
definitely looked like a shotgun, the kind you pump.
    I raised my hands – not high, not as
if I felt threatened, just enough to show her that they were empty.
“Sorry, Ma’am,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
    “ Then don’t disturb me. Go
away.”
    “ Ma’am, I don’t think
that’s called for. I just wanted a quiet place to practice, and
this street seemed perfect. I didn’t mean to bother anyone. I’ll
try not to be so loud.”
    “ I think you should try it
somewhere else.”
    “ Honestly, Ma’am, I think
you’re overreacting. Do you always answer the door with a
gun?”
    She glowered at me. “A boy was
attacked a few days ago, a kid from just up the street. Whoever did
it hasn’t been caught.”
    “ Well, it wasn’t me. A few
days ago I was in Maryland.”
    “ I don’t know
that.”
    I sighed. “I don’t want any trouble,
Ma’am.”
    “ Then go away, before I
call the police.”
    “ Ma’am, I’m on a public
sidewalk.”
    “ In a neighborhood where
you’ve got no business.”
    “ I was looking at the
trees,” I said, gesturing toward