The Little Friend полностью

On the dusty ground, two tab numbers from a clock radio—double zero, white on black—stared up at Danny, like a pair of cartoon google-eyes. Farish was grappling and groping with the can opener, dickering and dackering amidst the litter as if nothing at all was on his mind and though he wasn’t exactly looking at Danny he had a very strange smile on his face. Better to ignore Farish, with all his sly hints, his sneaky speed-freak games—but all the same, Farish obviously had something on his mind and it bothered Danny that he didn’t know quite what it was. For he suspected that Farish’s elaborate counter-spy activity was a display staged for his benefit.

He stared at the side of his brother’s face. I didn’t do anything, he told himself. Just went up there to look at it. Ain’t took nothing.

But he knows I wanted to take it. And there was something else besides. Somebody had been watching him. Down in the scrub of sumac and kudzu behind the tower, something had moved. White flash, like a face. A little face. On the scummy, shady clay of the path, the footprints were those of a child, dug deep and switching every which way, and this was creepy enough but farther on—alongside a dead snake on the trail—he’d found a flimsy little black-and-white picture of himself. Of himself! A tiny school picture, back from junior high, cut from a yearbook. He picked it up and stared at it, not believing what he saw. And all sorts of old memories and fears from that long-ago time rose and mingled with the mottled shadows, the red clay mud and the stench of the dead snake … he’d nearly fainted from the indescribable weirdness of it, of seeing his younger self in a new shirt smiling up at him from the ground, like the hopeful photographs on muddy new graves in country cemeteries.

And it was real, he hadn’t imagined it, because the picture was now in his wallet and he’d taken it out to look at it maybe twenty or thirty times in sheer incredulity. Could Farish have left it there? As a warning? Or a sick joke, something to psych Danny out as he stepped on the toe-popper or walked into the fish-hook dangling invisibly at eye level?

The eeriness of it haunted him. Around and around turned his mind in the same useless groove (like the doorknob to his bedroom, which turned and turned quite easily without actually opening the door) and the only thing that kept him from taking the school picture out of his wallet and looking at it again, right now, was Farish standing in front of him.

Danny gazed off into space and (as often happened, since he’d given up sleeping) was paralyzed by a waking dream: wind blowing on a surface like snow or sand, a blurred figure in the far distance. He’d thought it was her, and walked closer and closer until he realized it wasn’t, in fact there was nothing in front of him at all, just empty space. Who was this damn girl? Only the day before, some children’s cereal had been sitting out in the middle of Gum’s kitchen table—some kind of flakes that Curtis liked, in a brightly colored box—and Danny had stopped dead on his way to the bathroom and stared, because her face was on the box. Her! Pale face, black bowl haircut, leaning over a bowl of cereal that cast a magical glow up into her downturned face. And all around her head, fairies and sparkles. He ran, snatched up the box—and was confused to see that the picture wasn’t her at all (any more) but some different child, some child he recognized from television.

In the corner of his eye, tiny explosions popped, flashbulbs firing everywhere. And all of a sudden, it occurred to him—jolted back into his body, sitting in a sweaty flash on the steps of his trailer again—that when she slipped through whatever dimension she came from and into his thoughts, the girl, she was preceded in his mind by something very like an opened door and a whirl of something bright blowing through it. Points of light, glittery dust flecks like creatures in a microscope—meth bugs, that would be your scientific explanation, because every itch, every goose bump, every microscopic speck and piece of grit that floated across your tired old eyeballs was like a living insect. Knowing the science of it didn’t make it any less real. At the end, bugs crawled on every imaginable surface, long, flowing trails that writhed along the grain in the floorboards. Bugs on your skin that you couldn’t scrub off, though you scrubbed until your skin was raw. Bugs in your food. Bugs in your lungs, your eyeballs, your very squirming heart. Lately Farish had begun placing a paper napkin (perforated by a drinking straw) over his glass of iced tea to keep away the invisible swarms he perpetually swatted from his face and head.