Freak City Read online

  Chapter Eighteen

  He turned around to find himself not in the bedroom, but in a different and unfamiliar room. It was maybe seven by nine, dimly lit by a night light plugged into the wall, but no windows or furniture except for one rickety old wooden chair in the middle, and a shelf on the wall holding two tiny objects. He walked over to them, picked them both up, held them up to his face, and in the dim light he realized that they were a pair of toy robots, identical to the ones in the mystery package. While examining them, he felt a chill breeze and shivering, turned around to see a man standing behind him.

  "You don't know me,” the man said, "but I know you. I'm Dan Fulsom, and you're Argus Kirkham. You are the price that I have to pay."

  Argus gasped and blinked several times to make sure he was not seeing things. Fulsom was a short, sweaty man with foolish sideburns, wearing an unhappy brown suit and matching fedora. He seemed quite at ease in the room and began to pace back and forth.

  "It's the dragon, you know. It demands to be fed. But not just any old body will do. I've been trying to feed it for years. I've given it old people, sick people, homeless, unwanted. Criminals, thugs and old whores. It takes them all in but it spits them back out. Every one of them comes back to haunt me, like a boomerang.” He spat out these last words with anger. Facing Argus again he went on.

  "I must have a sacrifice, one that will stick and stay put, that the dragon will take, and keep. The ghosts have told me who it wants. It wants the one that got away."

  "I have no idea what you are talking about,” Argus finally spoke up. And really he thought, 'this guy is just nuts' and he remembered what Brian had told him, that nobody ever sees this guy, that he's holed up in secret somewhere, and Argus was astonished to realized that this was the place, the secret room, the place where the crazy man lived.

  "You say that you don't,” Fulsom said, "but you do. Maybe you've simply forgotten. You were only a child at the time, a small child. It was you who could see it, you who it wanted. You didn't go in. You let Uncle Charlie go first, but it didn't want him. It kept spitting him out. It was you that it wanted. You that it wants."

  "What it?" Argus asked, "what's this thing you keep talking about?"

  "The dragon. I told you. It lives down below. It lies under the city and waits. When it sees what it wants, it comes up. It has powers. It can look like whatever it wants, whatever will suit its convenience. It attracts like a flower and kills like a snake. For you, it looked like a bus. It wanted to take you away, and you almost went. Then the girl came and snatched you away, right when you were about to get on board"

  "Oh,” Argus said, finally remembering. "You mean Sapphire. You don't really believe in that story, do you? That was all just make believe. They told me about that when I was a kid, to explain what happened to my uncle. It's like Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny. They called it Snapdragon Alley, but you know and I know that's just the name of the mall you built, over by Sea Dragons stadium."

  "It was true,” Fulsom told him. "Not just a story. It really did happen, you know.”

  "No way,” Argus said. "It's a family joke."

  "It's no joke,” Fulsom told him, beginning to lose patience. "It is real. You've seen it yourself. You've just seen the ghosts. You must know by now . Your friends all believe. They know that it's true."

  "My friends only want to believe,” Argus said. "They want to have fun. They took some everyday ordinary coincidences and made a big pattern of it. We always see things when we want to believe in them. Old men playing cards in the park. Kids on a seesaw. Red cars, parked on the street. You can see those things every day if you want to and if you look hard enough and long enough and in enough places."

  "You just saw the ghosts a few minutes ago,” Fulsom insisted. "There's no use denying or pretending.”

  "Those were probably people you hired. Come to think of it, maybe all of them were. There is no monster,” Argus said. "There is no curse. There's just you. I heard you went crazy. Everybody says so. I guess all your money didn't help you with that."

  "I know what I know,” Fulsom said, "and you know it too. You've belonged to the dragon ever since that one day. Haven't you noticed? Your whole life, since then, you've been half in the world and half out. You don't even know who you are, you don't even know what you want. You go around like a zombie and that's what you are, a kind of a zombie. It reached out and touched you. It had you and lost you. That girl, that Sapphire, the one who pulled you away, you don't know what she did. She thought she had saved you, but really she killed you. She should have let you go in. If only she had let you go in"

  "I'm going now,” Argus said, but looking around, he noticed there wasn't a door he could see.

  "You're not going anywhere,” Fulsom declared, and Argus noticed that Fulsom was holding a gun in his hand.

  "I don't like to be so crude,” Fulsom said." Usually I use more civilized means, but this time, I can't afford to do that"

  Fulsom raised the gun and pointed it straight at Argus, who discovered that somehow he couldn't seem to move. It was as if he'd grown roots and was tied to the spot. He felt something pulling, like a weight pulling down on his feet from below and then suddenly he heard a bang and went crashing down through the floor. 'I must have banged my head on something', he thought, and then he felt someone tug on his arm and heard a familiar voice that said "Hey man, what's shakin?"