Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

"What does it mean, then?" Eve prodded him.

"That's what's so unsettling," he explained. "This sort of thing is happening all over the northeast, but it's concentrated here. I've lived as long as you have — "

"And how many can say that?" she whispered.

He ignored her and went on. " — and normally there's some kind of prophecy, isn't there? You'll get the clairvoyants with their visions and maybe some ancient writings, omens and portents — "

Eve turned sideways in her seat. "What do you call all this shit, then? Last I heard showers of blood and rains of toads were considered pretty ominous. And as for portents, there aren't many that can beat red clouds blotting out the sun."

Clay took a long breath and shook his head, but he kept his eyes on the road. "No argument, but normally there's some warning, enough so that people like Doyle, the kind of people who watch for these things, know they're coming much earlier."

A streak of black darted across the road in front of them and he had to jerk the wheel to the left to swerve around it. As the Cadillac shifted lanes he caught a glimpse of that black streak, but it was not a streak any longer. It was a dog, maybe a German Shepherd but he could not be at all certain. Whatever sort of dog it was, it was not the beast's fur that was black. It was the crows.

The dog had stopped now in the middle of Route Nine and they had a clear view. Clay slowed down even further and stared. The dog's body was covered by crows, their wings madly beating the air as their beaks plunged again and again at the dog, pecking it and tearing its flesh so that some of the black-feathered birds were splashed with its blood.

"You're right," Eve said softly. "It's unsettling."

Clay found no satisfaction in this admission. His foot felt suddenly heavy on the accelerator and the Cadillac sped up. He had had enough, now, of the signs and portents, had seen far too many people huddled inside their homes and looking out the windows in panic and wonder. Phone lines were out. Cellular communication was no better. Television and radio and cable signals were warped static.

From what Eve had told him, Doyle clearly had some idea what was going on. And if Clay knew Doyle, there would already be some kind of plan in motion. He wanted to know what it was and what his place in it would be. The time for watching it through the windows was over.

"Eve?"

"Yeah?"?Clay glanced at her. "Why are you always snapping at me? I'm not exactly Mr. Sensitive, but I'd like to know what I did to piss you off."?"Nothing," she said. "You didn't do anything."

They drove in silence for several minutes. Clay consulted the paper in his hand upon which directions to the Ferrick house were written in Squire's cramped scrawl. He left Route Nine and took them deeper into Newton, up narrow, tree-lined streets and past wealthy neighborhoods. In time he turned into a more conventional suburban street and peered at house numbers as they passed colonials and ranch homes. Many of the houses were dark and looked empty, their occupants having remained at the office or stuck somewhere else. But there were lights on in some houses and the sound of the Cadillac's engine brought faces to the windows.

Clay hated to ignore them, but he had no choice. If they tried to soothe the fears of every person who was afraid, they would lose focus on the larger picture, and the peril would only grow more dire.

At number seventy-two, a sand-colored split level with dark blue shutters, he turned into the driveway. The garage door was open and a Volvo wagon was inside. That was good. Mrs. Ferrick had called Doyle, but the phones had gone out shortly thereafter and there was no way to be sure she would stay put when the chaos had worsened.

"This should be interesting," Clay murmured, mostly to himself, as he put the car in park and killed the engine. He opened the door but paused when he felt Eve's hand on his arm.

"Hang on."

Clay turned to her and was surprised to see pain in her gaze. Eve was usually all hard edges and slick smiles.

"It's really nothing you did," she said. "It's me."

One leg already out the door, he held it open and studied her more closely. "How, exactly? How is it you, I mean? We've worked together before, Eve. I've got you and Doyle to thank for setting me straight when my life was a mess. But it's obvious I get under your skin. Why is that?"?Eve nodded slowly, then pushed her hair out of her face and met his gaze. She could be fierce, but at the moment there was vulnerability he had never seen in her before.

"Think about it. Think about what you are."

"What I am?"

She gave him a look that made him feel incredibly stupid, and then pointed upward. "You're His clay. You're connected to Him in a way that nothing else on Earth is. After the suffering he's put me through, you have to ask why being around you hurts me?"

His heart went cold. Clay stared at her but Eve looked away, opened her door and stepped out, the soles of her boots clicking on the pavement. She shut the door and started toward the house. After a moment Clay followed her, pocketing his keys. He wore the same face, the same form, he had worn in New Orleans, a persona had adopted many years before to make himself feel more human. But he had never been human. Sometimes, when he was particularly fortunate, he forgot that.

Eve rang the doorbell. With the buzz of mosquito swarms and the blood-red sky the utter normality of that sound seemed grotesquely incongruous, and yet for some reason it set him at ease.

They stood side by side on the doorstep.

"You're not the only one He has made suffer," Clay said, his voice low, unwilling to look at her now. "Perverse as it might be, I'd rather be suffering because I was the subject of His vengeance, as you've been, than because He couldn't spare a moment's thought to my fate."

There were noises inside the house, voices and the staccato noise of rushing footsteps on wooden floors. Clay's attention was drawn to the curtains in the bay window upstairs and he saw the face of a woman appear amidst the bone-white, lace-trimmed fabric. She was perhaps forty and might have been attractive without the fear that was engraved upon her features. Mrs. Ferrick, he assumed. She stared at her two visitors for a moment and then gestured to him to be patient, that she'd be right down, almost as if they were ordinary callers at her door and that the city was not being besieged by hellish occurrences fit for the Biblical book of Revelations.

Once more Eve gripped his arm, but this time her touch was gentle.

"You remind me," she said. "But maybe that's not so terrible. Hard as it is, you also remind me that I'm not alone."

Clay smiled and then there were footsteps on the stairs inside and the sound of the chain being slid off the lock, and the door was pulled open from within. In the woman's hands was a white business card that had once been crisp and new but had now been bent and had its edges made ragged by Mrs. Ferrick's anxiety. According to Squire, Doyle had given her the card years earlier. She had lent him little credence then, but Clay figured recent events had made her more open-minded.

"He sent you? Mr. Doyle?" she asked hopefully.

"Yes. You're Mrs. Ferrick?" Eve asked.

She nodded. "Can you… can you help Daniel?"

Clay felt for her. This woman's world had started to fall apart long before the sun had disappeared from the sky. "We can try. But it might be better if we talked about it inside."

Mrs. Ferrick glanced upward and then looked around her neighborhood, the landscape cast in a crimson gloom, and she nodded. "Of course, I'm sorry." She stepped away from the door. "Please, come in."

Danny Ferrick lay on his bed, staring at his ceiling with headphones on. His MP3 player wasn't working for some reason and so he had to resort to old CDs. He had a mix on at the moment that he'd burned himself, with The Misfits, Primus, Taking Back Sunday… all kinds of stuff, including some old school Zeppelin. If he could have gotten away with it with his mother just down the hall he would have dug through his closet to get the small bag of weed he'd scored the previous week and lit one up. He wasn't as into weed as a lot of the guys he knew — he couldn't call any of them friends, really — but the times he had smoked, it had taken away some of the weight that he felt pressing on him all the time. Right now, he would have liked to smoke some weed because he thought it might kill the urge to itch at his skull, just above his temples. He tried desperately to ignore the feeling, to ignore the way his sickly yellow skin had reddened around the hard protrusions on his head.