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

the end of the street. I turned my
head and pretended to start. “Did you see that?”
    “ See what?” She followed
my gaze, keeping the gun pointed harmlessly down and to the side.
That made me think she knew how to use it. Someone who wasn’t
familiar with guns would have brought it up automatically, and
might be waving it around wildly, maybe pointing it at my face; she
wasn’t doing that. She was handling it properly.
    I wondered what it was loaded with.
From what little I knew about shotguns, it could be anything from
rock salt to solid slugs.
    “ There,” I said, pointing
at the white-clad thing. “Under that tree; I thought I saw
something move.”
    She looked. “I don’t see anything,”
she said. “Light’s going, anyway. You go on about your business,
young man; if you want to look at trees there are some beauties on
East Main, and if you want to recite lines you can find a theater
somewhere. Around here you’re a public nuisance.”
    The white figure was definitely
supernatural, beyond any possible question, because I could still
see it just fine; in fact, it had turned to glare at me with dark
eyes set in a deathly pale face.
    It was the woman from my dream, no
doubt about it, and now that I got a good look at those eyes I knew
I hadn’t needed the woman with the shotgun to confirm
anything.
    I couldn’t talk to it with the
homeowner standing there, and it didn’t want to talk to me anyway.
The time had come to retreat and regroup.
    “ Sorry to have bothered
you, Ma’am, and I hope they catch whoever hurt that kid.” I nodded
to her, gave the thing under the tree a final glance, then climbed
back into my rental car.
    Daylight was fading rapidly now, and I
could see other things besides the one I had been talking to; there
was something that looked like an old woman in a dark robe crouched
on the sidewalk, hunched over and motionless. There was a pale,
offensively male shape, stark naked and somewhat larger than a
human, stalking through a nearby back yard.
    Three big obvious apparitions – that
was a fairly typical concentration for a quiet neighborhood like
this. Maybe a little less than average, really. There were some
smaller, less distinct ones around, too; I didn’t bother counting
them before closing the door and fumbling the key into the
ignition. Those fuzzy little ones turn up everywhere, and I’ve
never yet found one that could talk, or that was even remotely
dangerous.
    I was leaving but I wasn’t giving up.
I had found the neighborhood in just a couple of hours, and I had
found the mystery woman, the creature in white, right away, which
was much better progress than I expected. A few setbacks were to be
expected.
    I would come back later, when Mrs.
Armed Homeowner was asleep in her bed, and talk to the thing under
the tree again.
    I started the engine and turned the
car around.
     
     

Chapter Four
     
    I still didn’t know what was going on.
I knew there was a manifestation of the supernatural lurking under
a tree at the end of Jack’s street, I knew Jack had visited it, and
I knew something had gnawed off Jack’s finger, but that was about
it. The obvious theory was that the creature in white had bitten
the finger off, but I didn’t know that; in fact, the mystery woman
might be protecting Jack from some worse menace, and the lost
finger might have happened when she let her guard down for a
moment. There were lots of possibilities.
    The only two who were
likely to know what was really going on were Jack and the woman
under the tree, and neither of them seemed eager to tell anyone
about it. In my dreams Jack had insisted that he didn’t know what
had happened to his finger, and I couldn’t rule out the possibility
that he was telling the truth, but I didn’t think so. A kid who
found himself missing a finger, with no idea what happened to it,
would have been screaming and crying and demanding an explanation,
wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t have been calmly telling everyone