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

ability, my second
sight, or whatever you want to call it.
    But no, when I turned around I could
see the usual night-things in the yards and walks along the street,
and something unpleasant was hovering in the air above a house just
past the corner. It was only the little grove at the end of the
street that was strangely free of any supernatural
infestation.
    I was sure I’d seen and heard things
in those trees before, but they were gone now.
    I didn’t understand it. I
found it creepy. I mean, the night-things were creepy to begin
with, but I was used to them, and somehow not seeing them, when they’d been
there just a little while earlier, was even creepier.
    It had to be related to Jenny’s
disappearance somehow, but I didn’t know how.
    I waited for awhile to see
whether anything would reappear – I mean, it’s not as if I had
anything better to do – but eventually I gave up. I intended to
find a quiet place to park and sleep in the car, but I didn’t want
to sleep here ,
because having Ms. Shotgun find me snoozing out front in the
morning would not be good for my situation, so when I found myself
starting to doze off I started the car and headed back out of the
dead end. I eventually settled in a quiet corner of a shopping mall
parking lot, curled up, and went to sleep.
     
     

Chapter Five
     
    I did dream about Jack, but nothing
that seemed significant. I saw him lying in his hospital bed,
inspecting the bandage where his finger had been; I saw him eating
ice cream the nurses brought, and watching TV.
    And then I saw him waking up, and
getting dressed, and waiting for his parents, who arrived, and
helped him pack up, and took him downstairs and loaded him in the
car and drove away.
    I’d had a long day, so I suppose I
shouldn’t have been surprised that I slept later than I intended
to. I’d expected the noise of the mall’s Monday-morning business to
wake me up no later than nine, but apparently business wasn’t
booming, or I’d picked too quiet a corner, or I’d been more tired
than I thought, because when I was finally awake enough to look at
it my watch said half-past ten.
    “ Damn,” I said. Jack was
probably already home. My dreams had probably been in real time,
not visions of past or future.
    I wasn’t ready to meet him yet; I was
still hoping the dreams would show me more about Jenny, and about
Jack, and about why she was preying on him, and why he hadn’t told
anyone what happened.
    Of course, maybe that was just common
sense – “My finger was gnawed off by a skinny woman in a white
dress who lives under a tree” would probably not have gone over
well with the cops and psychologists.
    Still, I thought there was more to be
learned from my dreams.
    I didn’t know just how much contact it
would take to make the dreams stop; it hadn’t been an issue in the
half-dozen previous instances, because in every case I met the
person directly. I spoke to him or her, and usually shook hands,
the first time I ever saw him in person.
    If I saw Jack from a distance, would
that be enough? If he saw me, would that do it? I didn’t
know.
    I didn’t know what to do about any of
this.
    If Jenny had been human it
would have been simple – call the cops, let them deal with her. If she were a
vicious animal, once again, there were people to call, people who
dealt with such things.
    Most people couldn’t
even see ghouls
like Jenny, though – or ghosts, or whatever she was. There wasn’t
anyone I could call.
    If Jenny had been a live person, and
attacking children, and for some reason I couldn’t call the cops,
again, there would be a simple solution – get a gun and shoot her.
Killing a beast in self-defense, or defense of innocents, wasn’t a
crime. But shooting a ghost wouldn’t do any good. Bullets wouldn’t
hurt her.
    Well, actually, I’d never
tried shooting, but I knew a blade wouldn’t cut a ghost, and
running a car into one didn’t hurt it. I had tried those . I didn’t think bullets