Terry Brooks - Running With The Demon

Gran did a strange thing then. She rose without another word, went down the hall to her bedroom, and closed the door behind her. Nest sat at the kitchen table and waited. The minutes ticked by, but Gran did not return. She had left her drink and her cigarettes behind. Nest could not remember the last time Gran had left the kitchen table in the middle of the day like this. She kept thinking the old woman would reappear. She sat alone in the kitchen, bathed in the hot July sunlight. Gran stayed in her bedroom.

Finally Nest stood up and walked to the doorway and looked down the hall. The corridor was silent and empty. Nest nudged the wooden floor with the tip of her tennis shoe. A demon, a demon, a demon! Her mind spun with the possibilities. Was the demon Gran had known the same demon that was here now? She remembered John Ross saying he didn't know why the demon was interested in her, and she wondered if it was because of Gran. Perhaps the demon was trying to get to Gran through her, rather than to John Ross. Maybe that was its intention.

She looked down at her feet, down her tanned legs and narrow body, and she wished that someone would just tell her the truth and be done with it. Because she was pretty certain no one was doing that now.

After a few more moments of waiting unsuccessfully for Gran to emerge, she went back into the kitchen and picked up the phone to call Cass. The house felt oppressive and secretive to her, even in the brightness of midday. She listened to its silence over the ringing of the telephone. Cass Minter's mother picked up on the third ring and advised Nest that Cass and Bri–anna had already left and would meet her in the park by the toboggan slide. Nest thanked Mrs. Minter and hung up. She looked around the kitchen as if she might find someone watching, haunted by what Gran had told her. A demon. She closed her eyes, but the demon was there waiting for her, bland features smiling, pale eyes steady.

She glanced at the clock and went down the hall and out the back door. The picnic with John Ross was not until three. She had a little less than two hours to spend with Cass and the others before getting back. She stepped out into the heat and squinted up at the brilliant, sunlit sky. The air was thick with the rich smells of dry earth and grasses and leaves. Robins sang in the trees and cars drove down Sinnissippi Road, their tires whining on the hot asphalt. She wet her lips and looked around. Her grandfather came up the drive, returning from carrying up the yard waste. He slowed as he approached, and an uncertain smile creased his weathered face.

"Everything all right?" he asked. His big hands hung limp at his sides, and there was sweat on his brow.

Nest nodded. "Sure. I'm on my way to meet Cass and the others in the park."

Her grandfather glanced toward the house hesitantly, then back at her. "John will be here at three for the picnic."

"Don't worry, I'll be back." She gave him a reassuring smile. How much did he know about Gran and the feeders? "Bye, Grandpa."

She stepped around a sleeping Mr. Scratch and crossed the yard quickly, eyes determinedly forward so she would not look back. She felt as if her grandfather had read everything she was thinking in her eyes, and she did not want that. She felt as if everything was kept secret from her, while she had no secrets of her own. But there was John Ross, of course. She was the only one who knew the truth about him. Well, some of the truth, anyway. Maybe. She sighed helplessly.

She was pushing her way through the gap in the bushes when Pick dropped onto her shoulder.

" 'Bout time," he grumbled, settling himself into place. "Some of us have been up since daybreak, you know."

She gave him an angry look. "Good for you. Some of us have been trying to figure out why others of us aren't a little more truthful about things."

The wooden brow furrowed and the black–pool eyes crinkled. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She stopped abruptly beside the service road and looked off into the park. There were families laying out blankets and picnic baskets on the grassy lawn farther east where the shade trees began. There were baseball games under way, softball pickup contests. Two boys were throwing a Frisbee back and forth and a dog was running hopefully between them, giving chase. It was all familiar to her, but it felt quite alien, too.

"It means you were awfully quick to disappear last night after the spirits of the Sinnissippi appeared." She glared at him. "Why was that?"

The sylvan glared back. "Bunch of mumbo jumbo, that's why. I got bored."

"Don't you lie to me!" she hissed. She snatched him off her shoulder by the nape of his twiggy neck and held him kicking and squirming before her. "You saw the vision, too, didn't you? You saw the same thing I did, and you don't want to admit it! Well, it's too late for that, Pick!"

"Put me down!" he raged.

"Or what? What will you do?" She felt like tossing him out on the grass and leaving him there. "I know who it was! It was Gran! I knew it from a picture on the fireplace mantel! I thought it was Mom at first, but it was Gran! You knew, didn't you? Didn't you?"

"Yes!" He lashed out.

He stopped squirming and stared balefully at her. Nest stared back. After a moment, she placed him in the palm of her hand and squatted down in the grass next to the service road, holding him up to her face. Pick righted himself indignantly, brushing at his arms and legs as if he had been dumped in a pile of dirt.

"Don't you ever do that again!" he warned, so furious he refused even to look at her.

"You stop lying to me and maybe I won't!" she snapped back, just as angry as he was.

His mouth worked inside his mossy beard. "I haven't lied to you. But it isn't my place to tell you things about your family! It isn't right for me to do that!"

"Well, what kind of a friend are you, then?" she demanded. "A real friend doesn't keep secrets!"

Pick snorted. "Everyone keeps secrets. That's part of life. i None of us tells the other everything. We can't. Then there f wouldn't be any part of us that didn't belong to someone else!" He tugged on his beard in frustration. "All right, so I didn't tell you about your grandmother and the feeders. But she didn't tell you either, did she? So maybe there's a reason for that, and maybe it's up to her to decide if she wants you to know that reason and maybe it's not up to me!"

"Maybe this, maybe that! Maybe it doesn't matter, now! She told me when I asked her, even though she didn't want to! She told me, but it would have been easier if it had come from you!" Nest shook her head, and her voice quieted. "She told me about the demon, too. Is it the same one that's here now?"

Pick threw up his hands. "How am I supposed to answer that when I haven't even seen him?"

Nest studied him doubtfully for a moment. "He probably wouldn't look the same anyway, would he?"

"Hard to say. Demons don't change much once they're demons." He blinked. "Wait a minute. You haven't seen him, have you?"

Nest told him then about the encounter in church, about the appearance of the feeders and Wraith, about poor Mrs. Browning, and about John Ross. When she was done, Pick sat down heavily hi her palm and shook his head.

"What's going on here?" he asked softly, not so much of her as of himself.

She looked off into the park again, thinking it over, searching for an answer that refused to be found. Then she stood up, put him back on her shoulder, and began to walk once more along the edge of the service road toward the east end of the park. "Tell me about my grandmother," she asked him after a moment.

Pick looked at her. "Don't start with me. I've said all I have to say about that."

"Just tell me what she was doing with the feeders, running with them, being part of them." Nest felt her voice catch as the ugly vision played itself through again in her mind.