One-Eyed Jack Read Free

being out after dark. When the sun’s up, I don’t see the
various phantoms and apparitions prowling the streets of Takoma
Park; when it’s down, I see them all too well. It doesn’t exactly
do wonders for my social life, but I try hard to get home while the
sky’s still light.
    I managed it that night, and was
safely in my apartment well before dark. I didn’t want to be around
people, and I didn’t feel like cooking, so dinner was a ham
sandwich, and I spent the evening channel-surfing or browsing the
web. The Nationals beat the Pirates for once, and every episode of
“Friends” ended the way I remembered it, and there wasn’t anything
on any news I could find about a twelve-year-old
runaway.
    I was pretty sure what would happen
when I went to bed. Sometimes the dreams are spaced out, spread
over weeks or months, but getting the second one during a nap like
that made me think that this time there weren’t going to be any
gaps. Half of me wanted to put it off, give myself that much more
time before I got caught up in whatever this was, and the other
half wanted to get it over with so I could get on with my life, and
the result was that I packed it in about my usual time – turned the
TV off around 11:30, brushed my teeth, and dropped into bed a
little before midnight.
    And sure enough, I dreamed.
    I was back in Jack’s house, a silent,
invisible observer as the woman I’d seen standing at the sink
before, and who I took to be Jack’s mother, trudged upstairs,
leaving Jack’s father sprawled in front of the TV. “Sports Center”
was on; whoever these people were, they got ESPN. Not that that
narrowed anything down much; pretty much everyone with cable gets
ESPN. Half a dozen empty beer bottles – well, five empties and one
about half gone – stood on the table in front of the
sofa.
    Cable TV and beer, a house in the
suburbs somewhere, a wife and kids – what was this guy griping
about? He lived better than I did.
    The woman shuffled along the upstairs
hall, then stopped by a closed door and slowly, carefully, opened
it and looked in.
    She froze, her head in the door. She
opened it farther, stepped into the room, looked around at a
cluttered desk, and a bookcase overflowing with books and toys and
junk, and a bureau with three drawers closed and a half-open one
with a pair of jeans sticking out, and a bed.
    An empty bed. A bed that appeared to
have been hastily made up that morning, and not touched
since.
    “ Jack?” she called
quietly, as she flicked on the ceiling light.
    No one answered, and the light
revealed nothing she hadn’t seen in the light from the door, so she
glanced in the closet, then looked around the room again, then went
back out into the hallway and down the passage to the open door of
the dark, unoccupied bathroom.
    Then she tried the other closed door,
as quietly as she could, and found the little girl asleep with her
thumb in her mouth. There was no sign of Jack.
    The woman’s manner as she approached
the master bedroom made me think the idea that Jack could be in
there was a strange and unpleasant one for her, but I didn’t really
find out, because he wasn’t there, either.
    She went back downstairs and stood by
the family room couch, and when “Sports Center” cut to a commercial
she said, “Jack’s not here. I looked everywhere.”
    Her husband looked up blearily. “What
do you mean, he’s not here? Isn’t he in bed?”
    “ No, he isn’t. His room’s
empty. He isn’t anywhere in the house.”
    “ That’s... that’s
ridiculous.” He pushed himself into an upright sitting position.
“Where is he?”
    “ He’s missing. He’s run
off.”
    “ He wouldn’t
dare!”
    “ Well, I can’t find
him!”
    The man on the couch glowered at her,
then at the TV. Reluctantly, he picked up the remote and turned the
set off, then got to his feet, swaying slightly. He headed for the
stairs. “Jack?” he roared. “You up there?”
    “ You’ll wake Katie!” his
wife