Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection Read Free Page A

and wound the knotted string she found there around one finger. It was late, late for the Balloon Men to be rolling, but she didn’t doubt that there was something waiting to greet her out on the street.

    Perhaps only memories. Perhaps a fancy that Christy hadn’t trapped on a page yet.
    There was only one way to find out.
    2
    Peregrin Laurie was as sharp-faced as a weasel—a narrow-shoul-dered thin whip of a teenager in jeans and a torn T-shirt. He sat in a doorway, knees up by his chin, a mane of spiked multi-colored hair standing straight up from his head in a two-inch Mohawk swath that ran down to the nape of his neck like a lizard’s crest fringes. Wrapping his arms around bruised ribs, he held back tears as each breath he took made his chest burn.
    Goddamn beach bums. The bastards had just about killed him and he had no one to blame but himself. Scuffing through a parking lot, he should have taken off when the car pulled up. But no. He had to be the poseur and hold his ground, giving them a long cool look as they came piling drunkenly out of the car. By the time he realized just how many of them there were and what they had planned for him, it was too late to run. He’d had to stand there then, heart hammering in his chest, and hope bravado’d see him through, be-cause there was no way he could handle them all.
    They didn’t stop to chat. They just laid into him. He got a few licks in, but he knew it was hopeless.
    By the time he hit the pavement, all he could do was curl up into a tight ball and take their drunken kicks, cursing them with each fiery gasp of air he dragged into his lungs.
    The booger waited until he was down and hurting before making its appearance. It came out from under the pier that ran by the parking lot, black and greasy, with hot eyes and a mouthful of barracuda teeth. If it hadn’t hurt so much just to breathe, he would have laughed at the way his attackers backed away from the creature, eyes bulging as they rushed to their car. They took off, tires squeal—
    ing, but not before the booger took a chunk of metal out of the rear fender with one swipe of a paw.
    It came back to look at him—black nightmare head snuffling at him as he lifted his head and wiped the blood from his face, then moving away as he reached out a hand towards it. It smelled like a sewer and looked worse, a squat creature that had to have been scraped out of some monstrous nose, with eyes like hot coals in a smear of a face and a slick wet look to its skin. A booger, plain and simple. Only it was alive, clawed and toothed. Following him around ever since he’d run away ....
    His parents were both burnouts from the sixties. They lived in West Hollywood and got more embarrassing the older he became. Take his name. Laurie was bad enough, but Peregrin ... Lifted straight out of that Lord of the Rings book. An okay read, sure, but you don’t use it to name your kid. Maybe he should just be thankful he didn’t get stuck with Frodo or Bilbo. By the time he was old enough to start thinking for himself, he’d picked out his own name and wouldn’t answer to anything but Reece. He’d gotten it out of some book, too, but at least it sounded cool. You needed all the cool you could get with parents like his.
    His old man still had hair down to his ass. He wore wire-framed glasses and listened to shit on the stereo that sounded as burned-out as he looked. The old lady wasn’t much better. Putting on weight like a whale, hair a frizzy brown, as long as the old man’s, but usually hanging in a braid. Coming home late some nights, the whole house’d have the sweet smell of weed mixed with incense and they’d give him these goofy looks and talk about getting in touch with the cosmos and other spacey shit. When anybody came down on him for the way he looked, or for dropping out of school, all they said was let him do his own thing.
    His own thing. Jesus. Give me a break. With that kind of crap to look forward to at home, who