steady rattling sound. There was a creature from another world standing behind me. I could
Nothing. Stan was shoveling various bills into a bag. The store was otherwise empty. The door hadn’t opened since I had come through it. There was a bell on it. It would have rung had it opened. I looked back at the reflection.
The Thing was two feet closer.
And it was smiling.
It had a head whose shape was all but obscured by growths or lumpy scales or matted fur. But beneath its eyes I could see a mouth, too wide to be real, filled with teeth too sharp and serrated and yellow to belong to anything of this earth. That was a smile from Lewis Carroll’s opiuminspired, laudanum-dosed nightmares.
My legs felt like they were going to collapse into water at any second. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t move.
Malice slithered up my spine and danced in spiteful shivers over the back of my neck. I could sense the thing’s hostility—not the mindless anger of a fellow boy I’d needled beyond self-restraint, or Justin’s cold, logical rage. This was something different, something vaster, more timeless, and deeper than any ocean. It was a poisonous hate, something so ancient, so vile, that it could almost kill without any other action or being to support it, a hate so old and so virulent that it had curdled and congealed over its surface into a stinking, staggering contempt.
This thing wanted to destroy me. It wanted to hurt me. It wanted to enjoy the process. And nothing I said, nothing I did, would ever, ever change that. I was something to be eradicated, preferably in some amusing fashion. It had no mercy. It had no fear. And it was old, old beyond my ability to comprehend. It was patient. And if I proved too disappointing to it, I would only break through the veneer of that contempt—and what lay beneath would dissolve me like the deadliest acid. I felt . . . stained, simply by feeling its presence, stained as if it had left some hideous imprint or mark upon me, one that could not be wiped away.
And then it was behind me, so close it could almost touch, its outline towering over me, huge and horrible.
And it leaned down. A forked tongue slithered out from between its horrible shark-chain-saw teeth, and it whispered, in a perfectly low, calm, British accent, “What you have just sensed is as close as your mind can come to encompassing my name. How do you do?”
I tried to talk. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make the words form in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough air to push my voice up out of my throat.
Damn it. Damn it, I was more than some terrified child. I was more than some helpless orphan preparing to endure what someone vastly older and more powerful than me was preparing to inflict. I had touched the very forces of Creation. I was a young force of nature. I had seen things no one else could see, done things no one else could do.
And in a moment like that, there was only one thing I could ask myself:
What would Jack Burton do?
“I’m f-f-f-fine,” I said in a hoarse, hardly understandable voice. “That’s a mouthful, and I’m busy. D-do you maybe have a nickname?”
Its smile widened.
“Little Morsel, among those whom I have disassembled,” it purred, its tone wrapping lovingly around the last word of the phrase, “I have several times been called by the same phrase.”
“O-oh? W-what’s that?”
“He,” purred the thing, “Who Walks Behind.”
Chapter Thirty-two
“He Who Walks Behind?” I said, fighting a losing battle to keep from trembling. “As scary names go, that one kind of isn’t. I’d stick with the first one. More evocative.”
“Be patient,” purred the creature’s disembodied voice. “You will understand it before the end.”
“Uh, dude?” Stan asked quietly. “Uh . . . Who are you talking to?”
“Oh, tell him,” the creature said. “That should be entertaining.”
“Shut up, Stan,” I said. “And get out.”
“Uh,” said Stan. “What?”
I whirled on him and pointed the paper bag at him, my arms extending through the space where He Who Walks Behind apparently both was and wasn’t. “Get the hell out of here!”
Stan fell all over himself trying to comply. He literally went to the tile floor twice on his way to the door, his eyes wide, and stumbled out and into the night.
I turned back to the reflective surface of the video game’s screen, and just as I again found the shape inside it, fire erupted along my spine. I was slammed forward into the video game, and my head hit it hard enough to send a spiderweb of cracks through the machine’s glass screen. Pain, sickening and harsh, flooded through my skull, and I staggered.
But I didn’t fall. Justin DuMorne had been hard on me. It hadn’t ever been this bad, this scary, and it had never hurt so much—but then, it had never been for real. I grabbed the machine’s sides, forced my fingers to hold on, and kept myself from falling.
“Run! Run!” screamed the machine again. This time, the voice was blurred and distorted, disturbingly deep and malicious. I noted blurrily that the cracked and wildly flickering screen had a terrified wizard’s blood all over it. The game’s computer was apparently failing.
“You think that the inebriated little mortal is going to run to fetch the authorities,” purred the creature’s voice. I turned my head, looking around, and didn’t see anything. But the motion sent fire down my back, and for the first time I felt a trickling there beneath my jacket. I was bleeding.
“You think that if they come running in their vehicles, with their lights and their symbols, that I will flee.”
I turned and put my back to the machine. My legs felt wobbly, but I was beginning to fight through the pain. I clenched my teeth and snarled, “Get away from me.”
“I assure you,” came the creature’s bodiless voice, “that we will not be disturbed. I have made sure of it. But it does demonstrate that you possess a certain talent for performance under pressure. Does it not?”
“You sound like my guidance counselor,” I said, and wiped blood from one of my eyes. I took a breath and stalked forward, wobbling only a little. I grabbed the bag of money Stan had left on the counter. “I guess maybe you are a little scary.”
“Neither fear nor pain sway you from your objective. Excellent.” This time, the thing’s voice was coming from the far side of the convenience store. “But there’s no knowing the true temper of the blade until it has been tested. Even the strongest-seeming steel may have hidden flaws. This may be interesting.”
I paused, frowning, and looked up at my faerie godmother, who still sat at the edge of my grave, listening raptly. “I . . . Godmother, I’ve heard it said that ghosts are memories.”
“Indeed,” Lea said, nodding.
“Are the memories truth?”
Lea arched a rather caustic eyebrow at my words. “You ask your first question before finishing the tale?” Her mouth twisted in distaste. “Your storytelling form leaves something to be desired, child.”
“Yeah, I never did too well in English class. Will you answer the question?”
Her eyes became very, very green and glittered with a wild, gleeful light. “They are the facts, the events as you experienced them.”
I frowned. “I never really had a clear recollection of exactly what the thing said to me,” I said. “I mean, that blow to the head gave me a headache for days.”
