New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 19

She wanted to leave Portland-and she also wanted to stay here and make someone put Johansen in jail. But she couldn't stay here alone. Even if she did, what could she do about him, herself? She was afraid of him. She saw him sometimes in the neighborhood-he lived a block and a half down-and every time he looked right at her. And every time, too, it was like he was saying, I killed your mom and I liked it and I want to kill you too and pretty soon I will. It didn't make sense, her seeing all that, when he had no particular expression on his face. But she was sure of it, completely sure of it. He had killed her mom. And he'd liked it. And he had killed some other people and he'd liked that too.

She had no proof at all. Recurrent dreams aren't proof.

" . . . the movers are coming in about an hour," Dad was saying. "We're going to have a really good new life." He said it while looking out the window and he said it tonelessly. He didn't even bother to make it sound as if he really believed the part about a really good new life.

Two days later, they were ready to go to Los Angeles-and it had finally started to warm up in Oregon, like it was grudgingly admitting it was the beginning of summer. "Now that we're leaving, it's nice out," Jean said bitterly, from the back seat of the Explorer. The sky was showing through the clouds, and purple irises edging the neighbor's lawn were waving in the breeze and then, as Deede just sat in the front seat of the car, waiting for her Dad to drive her and her brother and Jean to the I-5 freeway, she saw Johansen walking down the street toward them, walking by those same irises. Dad was looking around one last time, to see if he'd forgotten to do anything, making sure the doors to the house were locked. He would leave the keys for the Realtor, in some prearranged place. The house where Deede had grown up was sold and in a few minutes would be gone from her life forever.

Jean and Lenny didn't see Johansen, Lenny was in back beside Jean, his whole attention on playing with the PSP and Jean was looking at the little TV screen over the back seat of the SUV. Fourteen years old, starting to get fat; her short-clipped hair was reddish brown, her face heart-shaped like Mom's had been, the same little dimples in her cheeks. She was chewing gum and fixedly watching a Nickelodeon show she probably didn't like.

Deede wasn't going to point Johansen out to her. She didn't much relate to her little sister-Jean seemed to blame Deede for not having the same problems. Jean had dyslexia, and Deede didn't; Jean was attention deficit, and Deede wasn't. Jean had gotten only more bitter and withdrawn since Mom had died. She didn't want anyone acting protective. Deede felt she had to try to protect her anyway.

Johansen was getting closer.

"This building we're moving into, it's, like, lame, living in a stupid-a.s.s building after living in a house," Jean said, snapping her gum ever few syllables, her eyes on the SUV's television.

"It's not just any stupid-a.s.s building," Lenny said, his thumbs working the controllers, destroying mordo-bots with preternatural skill as he went on, "it's Skytown. It's like some famous architectural big deal, a building with everything in it. It has the Skymall and the, whatsit, uh, Hanging Gardens in it. That's where we live, Hanging Gardens Apartments, name's from some ancient thing I forget . . . "

"From Babylon," Deede mumbled, watching Johansen get closer. Starting to wonder if, after all, she should point him out. But she grew more afraid with every step he took, each bringing him closer, though he was just sauntering innocently along, a tall tanned athletic man in light blue Lacrosse shirt and Dockers; short flaxen hair, pale blue eyes, much more lower lip than upper, a forehead that seemed bonily square. Very innocently walking along. Just the hint of a smirk on his face.

Where was Dad? Why didn't he come back to the car?

Don't say anything to Jean or Lenny. Jean would go back to not sleeping at night again, if she saw Johansen so close. They all knew he'd killed Mom. Everyone knew but the police. Maybe they knew too but they couldn't prove it. The coroner had ruled "accidental death."

Johansen walked up abreast Deede. She wanted to look him in the eye, and say, with that look, I know what you did and you won't get away with it.

Their gazes met. His pale blue eyes dilated in response. His lips parted. He caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth. He looked at her- Crumbling inside, the fear going through her like an electric shock, she looked away.

He chuckled-she heard it softly but clearly-as he walked on by.

Her mouth was dry, very dry, but her eyes spilled tears. Everything was hazy. Maybe a minute pa.s.sed, maybe not so much. She was looking hard at the dashboard.

"Hanging Gardens," Lenny said, finally, oblivious to his sister's terror. "Stupid name. Makes you think they're gonna hang somebody there."

"That's why you're going to live there," Jean said, eyes glued to the TV. " 'Cause they going to hang you."

"You're gonna live there too, shrimpy."

"Little as possible," Jean responded, with a chillingly adult decisiveness.

Deede wanted to ask her what she meant by that-but Jean resented Deede's protectiveness. She'd called her, "Miss Protective three-point-eight." She resented Deede's good grades-implied she was a real kiss-a.s.s or something, to get them. Though in fact they were pretty effortless for her. But it was true, she was too protective.

"Deede?" Dad's voice. "You okay?"

Deede blinked, wiped her eyes, looked at her Dad, opening the driver's side door, bending to squint in at her. "I'm okay," she said.

He never pushed it, hadn't since Mom died. If you said you were "okay," crying or not, that was as good as could be expected. They'd all had therapy-Lenny had stopped going after a month-and it'd helped a little. Dad probably figured it was all that could be done.

He got in and started the car and they started off. Deede looked in the mirror and she saw Johansen, way down the street, his back to them. Stopping. Turning to look after them . . .

As they drove away from their home.

"This place is so huge . . . so high up . . . " Deede, Lenny, and Jean were in the observation deck of the Skytown building, up above Skytown Mall and the apartment complex, looking out at the clouds just above, the pillars and spikes of downtown LA below them. They were in the highest and newest skysc.r.a.per in Los Angeles.

"It's a hundred-twenty-five stories, fifteen more than the World Trade Center buildings were," Lenny said, reading from the guide pamphlet. "Supposed to be 'super hardened' to resist terrorist attacks . . . "

Deede remembered what she'd read about the t.i.tanic, how it was supposed to be unsinkable, too. Skytown, it occurred to her, was almost a magnet for terrorists. But she wouldn't say that with Jean here, and anyway Lenny had been calling her "Deana Downer" for her frequent dour p.r.o.nouncements. "Just an inch the wrong way on that steering wheel and Dad could drive us under the wheels of a semitruck," she'd told Lenny, when they were halfway to LA. Jean had been asleep-but Dad had frowned at her anyway.

"When's Dad coming back?" Deede asked, trying to see the street directly below. She couldn't see it-the "hanging gardens" were in the way: a ribbony spilling of green vines and lavender wisteria over the edges of the balconies encompa.s.sing the building under the observation deck. Closer to the building's superstructure were rose bushes too, but the building was new and so were the rose bushes, there were no blossoms on them yet. The building had a square base-filling a square city block-and rose to a ziggurat peak, a step pyramid, the lowest step of the pyramid containing the garden, the penultimate step the observation deck.

"Not till after dinner," Lenny said. "He has a meeting."

"Is this part of, what, the Hanging Gardens Apartments?" Jean asked, sucking noisily on a smoothie.

"No, that's actually down," Lenny said. "This is the observation deck above Skymall. Whole thing is actually called Skytown. The apartments are under the gardens but they're called the Hanging Gardens Apartments anyway, just to be more confusing."

Feeling isolated, lonely, gazing down on the tiny specks that were people, the cars looking smaller than Hot Wheels toys, Deede turned away from the window. "Let's go back to the apartment and wait for Dad."

"No way!" Jean said, talking around the straw. "The apartment smells too much like paint! I want to see the Skymall! We're supposed to have dinner there!" She sucked up the dregs of her smoothie. "And I'm still hungry."

At first it was like any mall anywhere, though it was so high up they felt a little tired and light headed. Deede heard a security guard talking about it to the man who ran the frozen yogurt shop-the young black guard had a peculiar uniform, dark gray, almost black, with silver epaulettes, and the shapes of snakes going around his cuffs. "Yeah man, we're so high up, the air's a little thin. They try to equalize it but it don't always go. They're working out the bugs. Like that groaning in the elevators . . . "

Windows at the end of the mall's long corridors showed the hazy dull blue sky and planes going by, not that far above, and the tops of high buildings-seeing just the tops from here made them look to Deede like images she'd seen of buildings in Egypt and other ancient places.

There were only a few other customers; they were among the first to move into the building and the mall wasn't officially open to the public, except for the apartment owners. Walking along the empty walkway between rows of gla.s.sy storefronts, Deede felt like a burglar. She had to look close to see shopkeepers inside-the ones who noticed them looked at Deede and her siblings almost plaintively. Please give me some business so I feel like this new investment isn't hopeless and doomed to failure. "Sorry, Mister," she muttered, "I don't want to buy any NFL Official Logo gym bags."

"What?" Jean said. "Lenny she's mumbling to herself again."

He sn.i.g.g.e.red. "That's our Deede. Hey what's that thing?"

He pointed at a window containing a rack of objects resembling bicycle helmets crossed with sea urchins. The transparent spikes on the helmets seemed to feel them looking and reacted, retracting.

"Eww!" Jean said. "It's like critter antenna things!"

The store was called INTER-REACTIVES INC. There was a man in the back, in a green jump suit, a man shaped roughly like a bowling pin, who seemed to have a bright orange face. It must be some kind of colored light back there, Deede decided, making his face look orange. The man turned to look at them. His eyes were green-even the parts that should be white were green.

"Is that guy wearing a mask?" Jean asked.

The man looked at her and a rictus-like grin jerked across his face-split it in half-and was gone. From expressionless to grin to expressionless in half a second.

Deede backed away, and turned hastily to the next store.

"That guy was all . . . " Jean murmured. But she didn't say anything more about it.

You got weird impressions sometimes in strange places, Deede decided. That's all it was.

The next shop was a Nike store. Then came a Disney store, closed. Then a store called BLENDER. Jean stopped, interested: It seemed to sell things to eat. Behind the window gla.s.s, transparent chutes curved down into blenders; dropping through the chutes, into the intermittently grinding blenders, came indeterminate pieces of organic material Deede had never seen before, bits and pieces of things: they weren't definitely flesh and they weren't recognizably fruit but they made you think of flesh and fruit-only, the colors were all wrong, the surface textures alien. Some of them seemed to be parts of brightly colored faces-which seemed to squirm in the blender so that the apparent eye would line up properly with a nose, above lips, the disjointed face looking at her for a moment before being whirred away into bits. But the parts of the faces, when she looked closer, weren't noses or eyes or lips at all. "What is that stuff?" Deede asked.

Lenny and Jean shook their heads at once, staring in puzzlement-and the blenders started whirring all at once, making the kids jump a bit. In the back of the store was a counter and someone was on the other side of the counter, which was only about four and a half feet high, but you could just see the top of their head on the other side of the counter-a lemon-colored head. The top of the head moved nervously back and forth.

"Some kid back there," Jean said. "Walkin' back and forth."

"Or some dwarf," Lenny said. "You want to go in and see?" But he didn't move toward the shop. The other two shook their heads.

They moved on, pa.s.sing an ordinary shop that sold fancy color photo portraits, a store that sold clothing for teenage girls that neither Jean nor Deede would be interested in-it was for cheerleader types-and then a store . . .

It was filled with birdcages and in the cages were birds that didn't seem to have any eyes and seemed to have beaks covered with fur, from which issued spiral tongues. They moved around in their crowded cages so fast it was hard to tell if the impression Deede had of their appearance was right. A woman in the back of the shop had a fantastic piled-up hair style, an elaborate coif with little spheres woven into it, reminding Deede of eyes, randomly arranged into the high hairdo; she turned around . . .

She must have turned all the way around, really quickly, so quickly they didn't see the turn, because they saw only the elaborate coif and the back of her head again.

"This place is making me feel, all, sick to my stomach," Jean said.

"I think it's like . . . .not enough oxygen . . . or something," Lenny said. Sounding like Dad in his tentative way of speaking, just then. Then more decisively: "Yo look, there's an arcade!"

They crossed into the more familiar confines of an arcade, its doorway open into a dark room, illuminated mostly by light from the various game machines. "Lenny, give me a dollar!" Jean demanded.

"Stop ordering me around!" But he gave her a dollar, mashing it up in her palm, and she got a videogame machine to accept it. Deede had never seen the game before: it was called KILLER GIRL and it appeared to show a girl-so low-rez she had no clear-cut features-shooting fiery red bullets from her eyes and the tips of her fingers and her navel-was it her navel?-toward dozens of murkily defined enemies who cropped up in the windows of a suburban neighborhood, enemies with odd looking weapons in their pixilated hands. The neighborhood was rather like the one they'd left in Portland.

As Jean played, Deede and Lenny watching, the video figure that Jean controlled changed shape, becoming more definite, more high resolution-looking more and more like Jean herself. Then a videogame "boss" loomed up over a building in the game, a giant, somewhat but not quite resembling Gunnar Johansen.

"What are you kids doing in here?"

All three of them twitched around to face him at once, as if they'd rehea.r.s.ed it. A security guard was scowling at them. A man with small eyes, a flattened nose in a chunky grayish face that looked almost made of putty. He wore a peculiar, tight-fitting helmet of translucent blue, that pressed his hair down so it looked like meat in a supermarket package. There was a smell off him like smashed ants. He wore the almost-black and silver uniform with the snake cuffs.

"What you mean, what're we doing?" Lenny snorted. "Dude, it's an arcade. Work it out."

"But the mall's closed. Five minutes ago. Closes early till full public opening next month."

"So we didn't know that, okay? Now back the f.u.c.k off. Come on, Deede, Jean."

"My game!"

"Forget it. Come on, Deede-you too Jean, now."

The guard followed a few steps behind them as they headed for the elevators leading out of the mall-Deede thought Lenny was going to turn and hit the guy for following them, his fists clenching on rigid arms, like he did before he hit that Garcia kid-but he just muttered "f.u.c.k this guy" and walked faster till they were in the elevator. The guard made as if to get in the elevator with them but Lenny said, "No f.u.c.king way, a.s.shole," and stabbed the elevator "close doors" b.u.t.ton. It shut in the guard's face, on a frozen, minatory expression that hadn't changed since he'd first spoken to them.

Jean laughed. "What a loser."

The elevator groaned as it took them down to the apartments-like it was old, not almost brand new. It groaned and shivered and moaned, the sound very human, heart wrenching. Deede wanted to comfort it. The moans actually seemed to come from above it, as if someone was standing on the elevator, wailing, like a man waiting to be executed.

It was a relief to be back in the apartment, the doors locked, in the midst of thirty floors of housing about half way up the building: a comfortable, well organized three-bedroom place-the bedrooms small but well ventilated. No balcony but with a view out over the city. They had cable TV, cable modems, a DVD player, big LCD screen, an Xbox and a refrigerator stocked with snacks and sodas. Dad finally came home with pizza. Life was pretty good that evening.

A few days later, though, Dad announced he was leaving for five days. He had an a.s.signment for the magazine, had to fly to Vancouver, and they'd spent too much money getting here, he couldn't afford to bring the kids with him, though school was out for the summer. Jean refused to respond to the announcement with anything but a shrug; Deede found herself almost whining, asking whether this was going to be a regular thing. As a travel editor in Portland, Dad hadn't left town all that much, mostly he just edited other people's articles. Standing at the window, a can of Diet c.o.ke in one hand, he admitted he was going to be gone a lot in the new job.

"Yeah well that's just great," Lenny said, his mouth going slack with disgust, his whole frame radiating resentment-and he stuck his fists in his pockets, the way he always did when he was mad at his father, so that the seams started to pop. "I need to get my own place. I can't be babysitting all the time, Dad."

"Well until you do, you've gotta do your part, Lenny," Dad said, gazing out the window at downtown LA. "Just . . . just help me out this summer, while you figure out what college you want, get a day job, and all . . . all like that. And, and you're responsible, while I'm gone, for your sisters, you have to be, I just don't have time to find anyone reliable. "

"Like we need him to take care of us," Jean said. "Like Mom would leave us this way."

They all looked at her and she stared defiantly back. Finally Dad said, "This building is very safe, really safe. I mean, it's high security as all h.e.l.l. You have your door cards. But you shouldn't even leave the place while I'm gone if you can help it. Everything you need's here. Supermarket, clinic, it's all in the building. There's even a movie theater."

"It doesn't open till next week," Lenny said bitterly.

Dad cleared his throat, looked out the window again. "There are kids to meet here."

"Hardly anyone's moved in," Jean pointed out, rolling her eyes.

"Well," Dad hesitated, taking a pull on his Diet c.o.ke. "only go out in the day and . . . and don't run around in downtown LA. Downtown LA is dangerous. You can go to Hollywood Boulevard and go to a movie. Lenny can drive the car, I guess. But just . . . try to stay . . . to stay here. . . . "

His voice trailed off. He gazed out the picture window, watching a plane fly over.

She met Jorny in the Skymall when they got their iPods mixed up in the frozen yogurt shop. "Yo, girl, that's my iPod," Jorny said, as Deede picked it up from the counter. He had blue eyes that glimmered with irony in a V-shaped face, dark eyebrows that contrasted with his long, corn-rowed sun-bleached brown hair, a tan that was partly burn. He was slender, not quite as tall as her; he wore pants raggedly cut off just above the knees, with ANARCHY? WHO THE f.u.c.k KNOWS? written on the left pants leg in blue ballpoint pen, and a way-oversized T-shirt with a picture of Nicholas Cage on it hoisting a booze bottle, from Leaving Las Vegas. He had various odd items twined around his wrists as improvised bracelets-twist-its worked together, individual rings of plastic cut from six-packs. He wore high-topped red tennis shoes, falling apart-probably stressed from skateboarding: a well worn skateboard was jammed under his left arm.

"No it's not your iPod," Deede said, mildly. "Look, it's playing The Hives' 'Die All Right', the song I was listening to."

"That's the song I was listening to. I just set it down for a second to get my money out."

"No it's-oh, you're right, my iPod's in my purse. I paused it on 'Die All Right.' I thought I . . . sorry. But that really is the same song I was listening to-look! Same one-at the same time!"

"Whoa, that's weird. You're, like, stalking me and s.h.i.t."

"I guess. You live in the building?"

"You kids want these frozen yogurts or what?" asked the man at the counter.

They bought their frozen yogurts, and one for Jean, who was in the Mall walkway looking in store windows. It turned out that Jorny lived downstairs from them, almost right below. He was three weeks younger than Deede and he mostly lived to do skateboard tricks. His Dad had "gone off to live in New York, we don't see him around much." When she said her mom was dead he said, "Between us we almost got one set of parents."

Jean told him she did rollerblading-he managed not to seem scornful at that-and he and Deede talked about music and the odd things they'd seen in the mall shops and how they didn't seem to be the same shops the next day. "One place seemed like it was selling faces," Jorny said. "LATEST FACE."

"I didn't see that one. They must mean masks or maybe makeup."

He shook his head but didn't argue and tried to show her some new skateboard ollies right there in the mall but the putty faced guard began jogging toward them from the other end of the walkway, bellowing. "You-hold it right there, don't you move!"

"Security guards everywhere hate skateboarders," Jorny declared proudly, grinning. "f.u.c.king hate us. Come on!" He started toward a stairwell.

"Jean-come on!" Deede shouted, starting after him. Sticking her tongue out at the security guard, Jean came giggling after them as they banged through the doors into the stairwell and the smell of concrete and newly-dried paint, and pounded down the stairs, laughing.

"Hey you kids!" came the shout from above.

They kept going, Jorny at the next level down jumping a flight of stairs on his skateboard, and landing it with a joint-jarring clack. "You actually landed that!" Deede shouted, impressed-and privately a little dismayed. It was a big jump, though skateboarders did that sort of thing a lot. She was also pleased that he was evidently showing off for her.

"Yeah, huh, that was tight, I landed it!" Jorny called, clacking down the next group of stairs, ollying from one stair to the next. Jean squealed, "Agggghhh! Run! He's coming! That blue helmet weirdo's coming!"

They ran down the stairs, easily outdistancing the security guard, and bolted onto the mid-level observation court and community center. They took the elevator to the Hanging Gardens, where they went to check out Jorny's place, an apartment almost identical to their own. Deede didn't want Jean to come but couldn't think of way for her not to.

Jorny's mom was there for lunch. She was a lawyer, the director of the county Public Defender's office, a plump woman in a suit with a white streak in her wooly black hair, and a pleasantly Semitic face. She seemed happy to see Deede, maybe as opposed to some of the rougher people she'd seen her son with-all that was in her face, when she looked at Deede. She smiled at Deede, then glanced at Jean, looked away from her, then looked back at her, a kind of double-take, as if trying to identify what it was about the girl that worried her.

It had only just recently occurred to Deede that what she saw in other people wasn't visible to everyone. It wasn't exactly psychic-it was just what Deede thought of as "looking faster." She'd always been able to look faster.