safe.”
Mrs. Crowley grinned. “Now that is sensible. For you are safe and sound here. And in the morning, back to your families you go! I’ll sweep you straight out the door!”
“My mom and dad will be worried,” Tara said.
“So they will, so they will, child,” the old woman said. “But what choice is there? No phones, no nothing. Just the night and us gathered here, our candles keeping the shadows at bay. Of course, you’re hardly prisoners, if you wish to go back out there to what waits in that stinking water…”
“No way!” Mark said.
“Smart boy. We’ll have great fun. We’ll have cookies and cocoa and tell stories and when you’re tired, I’ll tuck you away safe and sound! Certain I will!”
Chuck looked around, smelling the cookies now and the cocoa. His stomach began to growl. You couldn’t see much of the apartment in the candlelight, but the rooms were large and high-ceilinged. Old fashioned, really. The wallpaper floral and gaudy, the woodwork carved oak. The chairs were plush and comfortable, the fireplace like something out of a fairy tale. The atmosphere was one of comfort and rest and protection. You knew instinctively this was the sort of place you would never be turned away from. The door would always be open and arms would always enfold you. There would be soft, warm blankets and deep feather beds. When he closed his eyes, he could no longer smell the fetor of the streets. He smelled fine memories and warmth, old books and yellowing photographs sitting on dusty mantels. The trace odor of baked muffins and soups bubbling away on stovetops.
Over the hill and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.
And that was funny, wasn’t it?
Isn’t this what gramma’s house was supposed to look like? Isn’t this what your imagination always described after years of being weaned on fairy tales and quaint childhood fables? Wasn’t this it? Wasn’t this the place he himself had seen in his dreams but thought he would never actually visit? His own grandmother lived in a time- share in Key West, took her vodka neat, and liked to argue things like annuities and blue chip stocks with his father. Her idea of a home cooked meal was to be found on the menu at Perkins and when she had cookies for you, you generally had to cut the plastic wrap free before you dug in because they always came from a store.
But this woman? Mrs. Crowley?
She was the real thing.
Brian asked her what she was still doing in Bethany, why she hadn’t gotten out with the others.
“Well, I knew there would be trouble and I’ve been here far too long to go running off with half-cocked notions,” she explained. “I am here to help and help I will! As to see is to sow, I always say. Old Mrs. Crowley leave? Ha! It’s not in her old bones! She’s a stain on these very walls that no hand can scrub free!”
“I was just wondering,” Brian said.
“Well, let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we?”
Chuck swallowed something down that just wouldn’t stay. Was it entirely his imagination or had there been some kind of threat in her words? He couldn’t be sure. But as warm and toasty as he now was, the old lady’s tone made the goose pimples rise on his arms. He didn’t know what he was thinking exactly. Sure, she was a nice old woman and wasn’t that enough?
Well, wasn’t it?
Yes, yes, of course it was.
It had to be. Yet…yet he felt almost threatened by all this. He likened Mrs. Crowley to a friendly old dog, but a strange dog that you did not know. Maybe it wagged its tail and smiled up at you in that comical way dogs have, but you still took a chance by petting it. You still took a chance by trusting it. Because when you petted it, it might wag its tail and lay its head against your leg…or it might sink its slavering fangs into your hand.
Stop it, he told himself, you’re just being stupid!
Yes, of course he was. Tara and Mark and Brian were perfectly happy. They knew that Mrs. Crowley’s place was an oasis, that outside these upright and sensible walls there was death. Things beyond death, white-faced and hollow-eyed that reached from the shadows and rose from the stinking water, grinning with yellow teeth. But he still could not relax completely. There were bad things outside, but what about inside? Trust did not come easy to him now. He was suspicious. He worried about himself, he worried about the others. Sure, him, Chuck Bittner whose old man was a ruthless moneyed stuffed shirt that spent his days acquiring more money and more capital by screwing people out of theirs. Chuck had been a selfish, conniving brat for ten years now, all his life, but something had happened out in those flooded streets and in that storm, something had woken up inside him and made him realize how silly all that was.
He cared about these kids even if they couldn’t stand him…or who he had been. And maybe that was part of it. He needed them to survive, he needed to help them survive, and if for no other reason than that they could see that he wasn’t so bad after all. That when this was done with, maybe they would actually like him and call him friend.
Chuck didn’t know what had happened inside him.
But it was there. It was real and, yes, it was very important.
So he was suspicious, paranoid, he did not trust. He felt responsible for these kids. He had to lead them home, no one else, only him. They seemed fine with all this, with Mrs. Crowley and her grandmotherly ways, but they’d also thought that clown was just Bozo or Clarabelle or Cookie, friendly and harmless. And they’d been wrong, hadn’t they? Terribly, dangerously wrong…
The cookies and cocoa came and the other kids dove in.
Who could blame them? Platters of hot steaming cocoa that smelled chocolatey and rich. Trays of peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies and mint cookies and lemon cookies. Cookies with cherries on them and white frosting, chocolate kisses and vanilla swirls. And all of them warm to the touch as if they’d just come from the oven and they must have.
Chuck watched Tara and Brian and Mark stuffing their faces, greedy fingers putting delicious cookies into greedy mouths. Cups of cocoa were raised and ooohed and aahed over. The faces of the kids were grinning and happy. They were laughing and crying tears of joy.
Nigel just watched.
Mrs. Crowley just watched.
And Chuck watched them suddenly horrified by what was happening here. They watched the kids like a couple slat-thin, ravenous wolves watching the three little pigs gorge themselves on goodies and treats, their fat pink bellies ready to burst. Fattening them up, a voice in Chuck’s head said, fattening them up for the stewpot. Whether it was true or febrile imagination run wild, he suddenly wanted to scream at the intimation of horror he felt. When he looked at the cookies, one word popped into his head: bait. Like when you were fishing, you impaled that worm on the hook, hiding the barb that would catch your fish, that would rip through its mouth in a bloody spray and hold it fast. And then his eyes drifted over to Nigel and he remembered a documentary they’d seen in school last year. How when cattle were led to slaughter, a decoy cow was used. A cow trained to lead the others into the slaughterhouse where they would be stunned and gutted and carved-up.
And that’s what Nigel was.
A decoy.
He had led them here and they had followed him, they had trusted him. If a dark, perverse stranger asked you to get into his car, you ran away. But if another kid said, hey, my dad’ll give us a ride, get in. Well, you went, didn’t you? Because that kid was part of your tribe and you could trust him.
It was about this time, as Chuck’s belly filled with white ice, that he noticed something else, too. Mrs. Crowley and Nigel…they were both drooling.
“Aren’t you going to have some cookies, Chuck?” she asked him, wiping her mouth with a hand that was skeletal and yellow-skinned.
“I’m…I’m not hungry.”
“Sure you are,” she said.
Chuck looked at Nigel. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
Nigel shook his head. “I’m not hungry. I’ll eat later.”
Mrs. Crowley held out a platter of cookies to Chuck. “Have one,” she said, her face very pallid and fissured like dry bark, her eyes behind those spectacles filling with blood. “It isn’t polite to refuse.”
Chuck slid back in his chair, an inch, maybe two or three. He was terrified now, knowing the secret and
