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Echoes. Roger Arthur Smith
Читать онлайн.Название Echoes
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781936097289
Автор произведения Roger Arthur Smith
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Серия Echoes
Издательство Ingram
“That’s right,” Dubykky lied straight-faced. “I was exclaiming to myself how much violence, turmoil, and misery there is in the world.” He gestured open-handed at the Nevada State Journal, the Reno morning paper, lying open on his desk. Cledge knit his brow. The headline only involved celebrities: “Lucille Ball Divorced from Desi Arnaz.” But he took the point. The day before, the headline had announced the electrocution of the author Caryl Chessman, which was controversial worldwide, and there was a nearly constant drumbeat of impending war with the Soviet Union, or the Warsaw Pact, or China, or North Korea, or any combination of them. News was bad news, and it was frequently bad for the very reasons that Dubykky mentioned.
Yet too, news was just news. To Cledge, it was born old and quickly faded. What truly occupied his mind was more immediate and durable: working during the work week and during free time pursuing his true passion. That passion had come as a second surprise to Dubykky during the job interview. After satisfying himself that Cledge was well trained in family and property law, he asked about hobbies, as if an afterthought. It was most definitely not that. A man’s hobby expressed how he attached himself to the world around him. A useful thing for Dubykky to know.
“I’m a rockhound,” Cledge replied, showing pleasure, pride, wistfulness.
Dubykky was delighted. A collector’s mentality was acceptable because it was simple to manipulate. More than that, Cledge’s hobby revealed his brand of good sense. For a rockhound, the west-central Great Basin was like Hollywood to a film buff. Everything that glittered, or could glitter with a bit of polish, was here, from amethysts to zeolites. Though not a native Nevadan, that rare breed, Cledge was in his natural habitat, for Mineral County was well named. It could not have a more appreciative, knowledgeable immigrant.
Any collector of rare beauty like Cledge yearned to show off his discoveries. If Mildred were to display interest—Dubykky tucked the thought away for now and laid out the contract that Cledge had come to ask about. It involved water rights. A ticklish issue in Nevada, water. There was so little of it.
“Oh, Milt?” he said as, their discussion concluded, Cledge was turning for the door. “Do you remember Mildred Warden? We had dinner with her at the El Capitan.”
The question was disingenuous. Dubykky knew that Mildred would be remembered. Cledge’s face told him that was so: remembered and with keen interest. Mildred had that effect on men.
He continued, “She and her mother, Gladys, would like you to join them for dinner tomorrow night. I’ll be there too—I’m practically a member of the family—and I took the liberty of accepting on your behalf. Does that suit you?”
It did. Cledge’s expression of gratitude was far more restrained than the eager anticipation his face broadcast.
ALTHOUGH THESE RECOLLECTIONS sped through Dubykky’s mind as he sat in the dark, he was by now thoroughly chilled, and deeply put out with himself for drifting from his trance. He gently transferred Jurgen to the seat and put on a jacket he had brought.
Backing the truck onto the yard’s hardpan, he turned around and moved on to the next hovel, a gray travel trailer propped on railroad ties, a quarter-mile farther downslope. There, stopped and in his trance, he sensed a faint vibration, like a velvet puff of air in his mind. This was not the right place either, though. The source of the sensation remained distant. He moved on.
At the next shack Dubykky had hardly stilled himself when evil irritated him like a mote in his inner eye. Turning off the engine, he removed a flashlight from the glove compartment and slid out of the cab. He did not switch it on, not wanting to startle Jurgen, who was now awake. Jurgen delicately sidestepped up his arm and onto his shoulder, and Dubykky picked his way by starlight through the junk-strewn yard.
The shack’s door, made out of mortar-shell crates, hung on rubber strap hinges. The shack proper, under the tarpaper, comprised walls of pallets on end, buttressed by vertical and horizontal two-by-fours, the whole structure about ten feet square. Dubykky wondered that the wind had not already leveled it, yet when he grasped the door frame and gave it a shake, the structure barely shuddered, flimsy as it looked. He nudged in the door with his foot. It swung open easily, silent except for a clack when it struck a milk crate behind it. On his shoulder, Jurgen started, then moaned a low, dry, drowsy nhrr in complaint.
Dubykky ducked through the doorway, clicking on the flashlight but keeping it trained straight at his feet. The roof was on a slant, the highest end over the entrance, only inches above his head. There was just one small window, curtained with a yellow terrycloth rag, to his left. Seated in that corner, legs splayed out on the rough plank floor, was the boy. He turned his head slowly at Dubykky. His features were pools of black.
Dubykky shifted the light cone so that the faint edge illuminated the boy’s whole figure. A lumpish body, a chunky head, heavy eyebrows, wild brown hair, and a blank expression. Or almost blank. A little twitch of the eyebrows hinted interest. Even a measure of recognition. Perhaps the boy sensed something about Dubykky. In any case, it was not the way a human boy would react if an adult found him alone in a dark shack.
Lying in the boy’s lap was the book that Mildred had checked out to him, Every Child’s Omnibus of Wisdom.
“Speak the name,” Dubykky commanded. If the boy was indeed the type of creature that Dubykky suspected, the command compelled a reply.
And so it was. As Mildred had described, a series of sounds like m, t, g, n, and s came in response, a slow, harsh garble. They formed no recognizable word or name.
“Matthew Gans?” asked Dubykky.
“Matthew Gans,” the boy pronounced precisely.
Dubykky regretted that Mildred had spoken names to the boy, although he could not fault her for trying to do her job. It was only that the creature would absorb and repeat everything indiscriminately.
“Mitchell Garrison?” he asked again.
“Mitchell Garrison.”
“Matilda Gosse?”
“Matilda Gosse.”
“Manuel Gonzales?”
“Manuel Gonzales.”
The boy enunciated each name, reacting to none more than the others. How would Dubykky find out which, if any, was the right name? It was best, he decided, not to worry about it for now.
He shook his head in an exaggerated manner. “No. You are not Matthew Gans or Mitchell Garrison or Matilda Gosse or Manuel Gonzales,” he said. “You are Junior. Say ‘Junior.’”
“Junior,” echoed the boy.
Following a long pause, during which neither the man nor the boy made a sound, Dubykky went to his side and crouched. He set the flashlight on the narrow ledge under the window so that the light shone against the back wall and revealed him to the boy as much as the boy to him. Dubykky looked long into his eyes, which did not waver. The few times Junior blinked, he did so with unnatural slowness. Dubykky picked up and studied the hand that had so disturbed Mildred. It indeed had only three fingers and a thumb. There was no indication that it had been mangled, though. Where the pinkie should have been there was no hint of a stump. Not even a metacarpal to support a finger. The sensible, human conclusion would be that Junior had a birth defect.
Dubykky knew better. It was a sign. A crucial sign. The mark of four. Its presence provided final confirmation of what Dubykky had surmised. The creature seated before him was an echo of evil like all the other echoes he had encountered. Every one had the mark of four somewhere on the body. Reflexively, his hand went to his own mark, the perfect diamond of moles at the base of the neck.
The sight of Junior seated there moved Dubykky. Another echo, another monster on the