despite her protests that it was safer if we were separated; I couldn’t quite get over how she had dismissed me at the picnic, and gone after the boys herself. She wouldn’t tell me safer from what, either, and so we walked down the silent streets, dodging between pools of streetlight, with the obvious question hanging over our heads like a cloud. I was not quite at ‘How did you know what that thing is?’ but I could consider ‘Where did you get the idea that it could be a real thing?’
I couldn’t think of a single answer on my own. It was one thing for her to be intelligent, which no one doubted; it was another thing to be the holder of knowledge that no-one else had. Was it an alien? Some kind of secret government project? A genetically modified animal? Who would make such a thing, and from what? A... a black bear, and a vulture, and a snake, and a bat?
But there was something about her caginess, her disavowal of all certainty. Her refusal to speak now, as if it would appear again upon hearing her voice. I shivered, thinking about it, looking behind me.
Johnny lived in a quiet neighbourhood—rich folks don’t like traffic noise or screaming kids—but it was absolutely without sound tonight, only the wind, so quiet I could hear my heart beat. I kept glancing into the black, shivering trees between the houses, wondering if something hid behind the slender trunks. Watching us, as it had watched earlier.
Things seemed to move in the corner of my eye as Johnny unlocked the door. And she could see them too—she kept jumping, fumbling the numbers, peering nervously around us. Well, at least one of us got home safe. “Goodnight,” I said. “Listen, if you see that thing again, call me and I’ll—”
She jerked away from me, hitting her back against the door; I instinctively looked behind me. Nothing. Darkness. All the shades of darkness, and streetlight soft and orange on the shadowed lawn, patchy beneath swaying leaves. What had she seen?
Before I could ask, she beckoned me inside, and slammed the door. We stood panting for a moment in the oval of light from outside, as if we had been running.
Probably a squirrel or a rabbit or somebody’s outdoor cat, for Christ’s sake, not the... thing. Alien-thing. Probably shrubbery.
I slumped against the wall and laughed. How obvious was it that it was a stalker, someone in a cheap black Grim Reaper costume left over from Halloween, with a skull mask on top? It was probably glow-in-the-dark, too. For fuck’s sake, me thinking it was an alien or a yeti or some weirdo genetic splice. Our government couldn’t even get running water on reservations, there was no way it could clone a bear with a snake. If anything, aliens were more likely than some garbage animal cooked up in a government lab. And less likely than another pedophile stalker, like the ones that came creeping out from under their rocks after that Time cover.
She’d gotten a lot of zoning concessions to build this house so that it looked like its neighbours outside; it wasn’t till you got deep that you’d know it was hers. Or a supervillain’s, maybe. But a stalker would know. Might be out there now, dressed in black. Wouldn’t even need to have followed us, if he’d done his homework and figured out her address.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“I saw... I mean, I thought I saw...” She shook her head, and moved away from the decorative glass pane of the door, as if someone were peering through it right now, inches away. “Don’t leave. I need to go make some phone calls.”
“What? It’s the middle of the night! I have to get home, I have work tomorrow!”
She disappeared into the darkness, and I took a single step to follow, then stopped. You can’t just boss me around! I wanted to yell, but frankly, there would have been no point.
Something dark fluttered again on the lawn, the cat or leaf or shadow, the perfectly ordinary thing, I told myself as I fled from the door, no longer laughing. There was something out there. Something that had frightened her. How safe were we in the house?
I took a deep breath and headed to the stair tree. The Red Line would lead down to some places I knew—theatre, games room, a couple of small chemistry and biology labs, a tissue culture room, and Ben’s tank. It was