“Yeah, great,” Karl says. “Thanks again for changing her oil.”
“My pleasure.”
Two heartbeats go by.
“Mustang running all right?” Karl says, nodding at Andrew’s car.
“Yes, sir.”
“Sure is a nice one.”
“Thanks.”
“Turquoise was an interesting choice.”
“That’s how she came.”
“Paint jobs are pricey.”
“They can be.”
Two more heartbeats.
“You need any juice or maybe a glass of water? Must be thirsty. Hot as heck out here.”
It really isn’t all that hot.
“Water would be great.”
Both men start to get up, but Anneke gently puts her hand on her dad’s shoulder so he keeps his seat.
She goes to get the water.
“So,” Karl says, looking back at the door to make sure Anneke isn’t coming yet. He’s winding up to ask something awkward, and Andrew’s skin crawls.
How does he make me feel twelve and tongue-tied?
“Yes, sir?”
Again with the sir.
This kid doesn’t sir anybody else, I’d bet on it.
Knows I served and wants me to like him.
Kid hell, he’s like forty, just wears his hair long so he looks like Pocahontas. Probably puts shoe polish in it.
Probably uses moisturizer and plucks his eyebrows, too.
Goes down to the day spa in Syracuse.
I can see this guy getting a pedicure.
I want to like him, I do.
Anneke sure spends enough time with him.
Guy and a girl don’t spend that kind a time together without.
Is he?
I kinda hope he is.
“Are you and Anneke…?”
“Sir?”
There’s no way in hell.
A guy like this.
Unless she likes him ’cause he looks a little like a girl.
I don’t even know if it works that way.
Shit, here she comes.
“Are you staying for dinner?”
Anneke hands Andrew a water glass with faded sunflowers painted on it, the last one of the eight-piece set from her childhood.
“You know we are, Dad.”
But only Anneke spends the night.
20
Night.
Andrew opens his eyes in the near-darkness of his own house, two wicks of his three-wick bedside pillar candle still alight, nearly but not quite drowned in red wax.
His paperback copy of The Baron in the Trees lies open facedown on the pillow.
Something is watching him.
He knows what.
He also knows it’s three in the morning.
That’s when it most often comes.
“Ichabod.”
The entity doesn’t respond.
“Ichabod, say something.”
“Something.”
It has chosen a little girl’s voice.
“Manifest in a form I won’t find disagreeable.”
“Ja, mein Captain,” it says.
A gently glowing Katzenjammer Kid, the blond one, appears, sitting on Andrew’s leather chair, its legs primly crossed at the knee. While Andrew appreciates the novelty of seeing the little German cartoon boy in 3-D, it is mildly disturbing. Perhaps a cat’s whisker shy of being disagreeable.
Ichabod has a sniper’s precision when it comes to causing unease.
Ichabod isn’t its name, of course, but then neither was the long Sumerian name whose first three syllables sounded vaguely like Ichabod.
“Did you touch my foot?”
“Just playing little piggies.”
“I don’t like that.”
“It seemed the gentlest way to wake you.”
“Don’t do it again.”
“Is that a command?”
“Yes. Are you going to insist on protocol?”
“Not this time. It seems a modest enough request. Note to myself: no touching Master Andrew’s sleeping piggies. Check. Anything else?”
Andrew sits up, gathering the sheet around him.
“Tell me why you’re here.”
“What, here?” it says, and now the Katzenjammer Kid is sitting in bed next to Andrew, hands on lap, looking like a child who wants to be read a story. It gives off cold like a ham just out of the freezer. It has chosen to be heavy—it depresses the bed.
Andrew forces himself not to recoil.
“Go back to the chair and remain there until I dismiss you.”
It blinks its big cartoon eyes twice.
Andrew draws a breath to begin the formal command, but Ichabod winks out and winks back in on the leather chair, sitting lotus-style.
“Well?”
“Well what?” it says in an incongruously masculine bass.
“Tell me why you’re here.”
“Can’t I just visit? I get lonely in my lair. There’s not a great deal to do there.”
“Then go back where you came from.”
“And miss the rest of your life? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Andrew sighs anxiously.
It speaks again, using its fallback voice, petulant intellectual.
“I’m worried about you, Captain. Master. Master Andrew Commander.”
“Tell me why.”
“You know why.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s time.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Only because you don’t want to know. But you need to know.”
“Just say what you have to say and go.”
“You might have let me destroy your rusalka. When I offered.”
“I don’t want her destroyed.”
“But now it’s too late.”
“For what?”
“That Russian she drowned was an extraordinary specimen.”
“Fucking tell me.”
At Andrew’s flash of anger, the cartoon child flushes red as though someone had poured blood into it and begins to flicker.
Becomes a writhing squid for a split second, then reverts to Katzenjammer Kid.
“Some people see God’s hand in coincidence. Are you one of these?”
Andrew seethes.
“Just…”
It cuts him off.
“Ask your rusalka for the dog’s collar.”
“Why?”
“You will want to research its owner.”
21
“There are two kinds of users,” Andrew tells Anneke. “Plodders and intuitives. Also called disciples and heirs.”
Anneke is walking a penny around in the palm of her hand. Moving small objects is almost always how it starts; Andrew has told her she has to find something she can move and move it three times a day for at least ten minutes.
She favors the penny.
They are sitting in her inside studio, the one she uses when the weather won’t allow work al fresco. Today, through the sliding glass door, it rains in indecisive spits and sputters, bedewing the greenery outside, greenery all the more dazzling when overtopped by gray.
All manner of pottery in various stages of completion crowds Anneke’s little workshop; ten whitish-gray mugs rest upside down on a board over a plastic tub of clay. Cedar Heights clay, to be exact, its yellow letters emblazoned on a stack of red sacks upon which a clay-bedabbed tower of DVD cases leans, as if eager to consummate, toward the DVD player and television on high. Everything leans and balances in here. Everything is smeared, dabbed, or stippled with clay, white or red.