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

it was
an accident, and that he didn’t remember what kind of accident.
Maybe at first, while he was still in shock, but those dreams had
dragged on and on and on, and Jack had stuck to his story for
hours, maybe for days , without ever getting upset. That wasn’t shock, that was
lying.
    He knew, and he wasn’t
telling.
    And the woman under the tree didn’t
want to talk to me because I was an adult – but she had wanted to
talk about Jack.
    I wished the homeowner hadn’t
interrupted; I might have gotten something out of the
creature.
    I still might, if I went back about
2:00 a.m.
    I drove out of the
neighborhood onto a major street called Winchester Road. As long as
I was in Lexington, I figured I might as well look around; I didn’t
have anything better to do until midnight or so.
    It wasn’t a bad-looking city, from
what I saw of it. Lots of tree-lined streets in the older
residential areas. Some nice buildings downtown. Some not so nice
industrial areas along Winchester Road, too, but that’s
normal.
    There were things lurking in the dark,
though. There was something shapeless and dark gray that was
perpetually falling from one of the towers on High Street. Thin
blue blurs slithered along Water Street. One block on West Main had
a line of phantom storefronts laid across the modern facade of an
office building, a phenomenon I’d never seen before.
    I didn’t see these things in daylight,
but at night they were almost everywhere. When I got away from
downtown again I saw black things with scalloped wings flittering
through the trees, and pale shapes moving in the gutters, and a
hundred other varieties.
    I was fairly sure they
were there in the daytime, too, at least most of them, but I
couldn’t see them
in sunlight. And they were weaker by daylight, I think. Most of
them were weak to begin with, and harmless, and the sun seemed to
weigh them down into complete invisible impotence.
    That thing under the tree,
the woman Jack had talked to – well, first off, it wasn’t a woman,
because the lady with the shotgun hadn’t been able to see it.
Beyond that, though, it was unusually powerful; I had been able to
see it when the sky was still light, and Jack had apparently been
able to treat it as a material being. How powerful, or what form that
power might take, I didn’t know.
    On TV, the psychics and witches and
detectives can look this stuff up; they’ll haul out musty old books
and flip through them until they find the particular monster
they’re fighting, or they’ll google stuff up on the web. There
might be a mentor figure who’s an expert on the six hundred and
forty-seven kinds of demons, or a friendly magician who can cast a
spell that explains everything.
    I wish I had something like that. I
don’t. I have my dreams, I can spot people with some sort of second
sight or psychic power, and at night I can see the ghosts and
monsters, and that’s it – Mrs. Reinholt said she’d given me four
gifts, but I only count those three. Practically the only two
people I’ve ever talked to about the stuff that I can see are Mel
and Mrs. Reinholt; Mel doesn’t know any more than I do, and Mrs.
Reinholt has been dead for years.
    I used to visit psychic advisors and
wiccan priestesses and that sort of thing, but none of them knew
anything useful. Most of them were outright frauds. A few had
fooled themselves, as well as their customers. A couple might have
really been seeing something, as they maybe had a faint trace of
that psychic otherness, but they were pretty vague about it, and
from what they told me they didn’t see the night creatures the same
way I did. They couldn’t help me much.
    I’d met a few kids who could see some
of the night creatures, but they generally knew even less than I
did, and the ones I’d known longest all grew out of it. Most of
them didn’t even remember that they used to see things in the
dark.
    The few real psychic
adults I’d spotted and managed to talk to over the past eight