Chapter 17
Illyria had left as suddenly as she'd arrived, vanishing just beyond the dining room and forcing a startled, bare-naked Fred to dive for cover in the kitchen pantry as the catsuit dissolved around her.
"Just humor her a little, Spike. She's got her panties in a wad over something; I'm not sure what."
"They're your panties," Spike had grumbled as he handed her clothes to her.
They'd said their good-nights to Oz and given Angel and Nina a lift to the Roadrunner to pick up Nina's car. Now, as those tail lights pulled away, they found themselves simply sitting, neither one ready to begin the tiring drive home. The combination tavern and diner adjacent to the motel was still open, recent murders in the parking lot slowing business only a little, and its faulty neon sign winked at them through the windshield. Warm air from the dashboard heating vents blew in their faces, lulling them with a heavy comfort.
It would be so easy to just close our eyes and go to sleep...until we ran out of gas and woke up with chilblains and runny noses. Fred gave her head a quick jerk and shifted in her seat.
Spike switched off the ignition key. "Got any dosh on you, Puppet?"
"Huh? Oh. Seven...let's see...seventeen dollars."
"Should be enough. Why don't we grab a bite before we go."
No matter how many times she'd been inside one, Fred had never been able to shake the niggling feeling that she didn't belong in a bar. There was something about the atmosphere that made her feel like a child who'd wandered in uninvited, disturbing the adults and killing the party mood. In high school it'd been a challenge to try it, but once in, she'd never known quite what to do with herself or what was expected of her. All these years since, and in spite of experiencing things that would make a bar look like a Sunday School picnic, she still felt...geeky.
The masculine eyes crawling over her from sundry parts of the room didn't help much, either. They made her very glad that Spike was with her - he blended in here, with the dark clothes and the slight swagger, his face hardening into a cool, dangerous "don't mess with me" attitude as he slid a protective arm around her waist and escorted her to a table, and in her belly and below she felt the tight powerful pull of desire for him.
Once in the booth beside her, with Fred on the inside and safely tucked out of harm's way, he relaxed and let the mask drop. "All comfy?"
"Ummmmm-hmm. If I were any more comfortable I'd shit nickels."
That's Burkle himself talking. Like father, like daughter. Spike choked out a laugh. "And not a slot machine in sight, is there? Pity."
They ordered tater tots with cheese, and Fred immediately found her appetite and gobbled the little fried potato balls floating in Velveeta paste. Spike left the bulk of them to her. He picked at a paper napkin with his thumb and forefinger, silent now and pensive. When he had shredded it into a pile of confetti, he finally spoke.
"Do you think flowers have an afterlife?"
"Flowers?" Fred wiped a glob of cheese from her bottom lip and gazed at him blankly.
"Y'know - plants. Do you think plants get to go to Heaven?"
He was completely serious, she decided. She stared at her tots and thought it over. "You mean when they die? ...I guess so. I never thought about it before. I guess they could, I mean, they're living creatures, and it's not like they could do anything to go to Hell for - except for the poison ivy that I sat in at Camp that time in my bathing suit and you don't want to know all the places that it spread to, but sure, why not? I think it's a lovely idea." She gave him a smile and studied his face, still curious. "What made you ask?"
He had the Far Away And Long Ago look in his eyes again. "There were some a friend of mine was given once."
"Someone nice, sounds like. Anyone I know?"
A strange noise cut off his answer.
It came from the throat of a thirty-six-year-old truck driver who'd been practicing pool near the restrooms.
The colored balls clicked and rumbled across the surface of her billiards table. Other than the broken Astroids game in the corner, it was the only recreational equipment in the entire Roadrunner complex, the leaky swimming pool behind the motel having long ago been given up as a lost cause. Overhead, an ugly industrial fixture lit the game through smoky tobacco haze. Seven ball in the corner pocket. Three ball, hit off-center. She tucked her hair behind her ear and bent across the table again.
Four ball, banked off a corner.
As she straightened back up, her cue stick bumped the little block of chalk on the table's rim and knocked it into a center pocket, where it tumbled out of sight. She reached into the hole, felt nothing, and frowned. Evidently the chalk had bounced deeper into the hole than she thought. She put her arm in further and groped about, trying to retrieve it.
A hand wrapped around her wrist.
She couldn't see it, down in the horizontal tube under the rim that led to the collection rack at the table's far end, but it was small and warm and it held her hand fast. The trucker let out a shriek that was almost a horse-like whinny and jerked backward, pushing against the table with her free hand. The thing inside the table tightened its grip and pulled her in past her wrist. She howled with terror, unable to get at the thing or even to see it.
By now the entire room was on its feet and staring at her. "The felt," someone wheezed. "Look at the felt!"
The felt was moving. Something was pressing against its soft green surface from underneath, making it bulge and undulate. Two lumps rose and fell side by side in the material as though a sleeper were raising his knees beneath his bedcovers. A third lump, larger than the first two, began to form, and before it flattened out again it clearly, unbelievably, took the shape of a human face.
A heavyset waitress yelled and lobbed a whiskey bottle at the table. It smashed across the playing surface, spraying glass and liquor on the shrieking trucker. The waitress snatched a cheeseburger and a handful of onion rings from the plate of a startled barfly and threw those, too, and then she threw the plate. There was a faint but audible hog's-squeal sound, and suddenly the trucker's hand was free.
"AAAAAAAAAAAH!" She bawled and stumbled away from the pool table and almost collided with Spike. With one eye on the table, he grabbed her wrist and turned it over, examining it on both sides. No cuts or bites or scratches, but several red, bruised, finger-shaped marks, and a larger bruise where her arm had hammered against the edge of the pocket. She wailed and clutched at him and he passed her off to Fred, who was almost toppled over by the terrified woman's embrace.
The pool table's surface was smooth again. Its felt lay flat and taut, every inch of it glued down tightly. One of the customers picked up a cue stick and prodded it from a distance with great caution, but aside from its new ornamentation of glass and china shards and disassembled cheeseburger, it seemed completely normal. The air began to fill with the chattering voices of the staff and patrons.
"It's this hanging lamp. Look, lookit its shadows. See the shadows when you jiggle it? It was just shadows, that's all."
"Shadows, my ass."
"My ass and your face. I'm tellin' you it was the lamp!"
"I ain't payin' for that hamburger."
"The table screamed, I swear to God the table screamed!"
"That was Josie screaming, you horse's butt."
Spike walked slowly around the game table, watching it, smelling it. He ran his palm along its rim where the trucker's arm had been trapped, feeling for vibrations. He knelt down and peered at its underside.
The fat waitress knelt on the other side of the table and studied its underbelly, too. "She says a hand was in it," she said to Spike. "But I don't see how. There's no place under here where anyone could hide, and there isn't no hole anyone could'a stuck their hand through." She squinted up into the black, cobwebbed corners and pressed her lips together grimly.
The truck driver had retreated to the tavern's front doorway, where she stood hiccoughing and clutching her injured wrist. Fred was saying something to her and patting her on the back, but the trucker only shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. Eventually her partner walked over and led her out.
"It's possessed," a teenage boy with a buzzcut decided. "Dude, we need to sprinkle holy water on it or something." He looked around the room. "Anybody here wearing a crucifix?"
A wrinkled little Hispanic man stepped forward. "Here. I got this." He reached underneath his shirt and pulled out a capsicum arthritis adhesive plaster with a colored picture of Our Lady Of Guadalupe printed on one side. The buzzcut boy took it and laid it solemnly on the felt tabletop beside the splattered burger and onion rings.
The owner of the lampshadow theory rolled his eyes, exasperated. "Oh, good lord."
"No, no," the little wrinkled man corrected, "His mother."
"Come on, you people," the bartender announced loudly. "It's closing time, anyway. Let's just everyone pack up and go home. You can all come and bring your friends tomorrow to look at the haunted pool table."
Bit by bit the tavern emptied. Finally only the bartender and his waitress were left to shut down the kitchen and lock the building up tight. Fred and Spike waited patiently by their vehicle until the waitress had driven away and the bartender was climbing into his own car. "Sir!" Fred called out to him. She hurried over, Spike behind her. The bartender looked up at her with a face that was ashen.
"This is going to sound weird-" Fred pulled a business card from her purse. "-But we wanted to let you know that if you have any more trouble with, you know, out of the ordinary things like what happened in there earlier, you can give us a call. We've had lots of experience with this sort of thing, and we might be able to help. I know you probably think I'm wacko-"
"It's happened before."
The bartender spoke so softly that they had to strain to hear him. "Those killings last night, I figure that was just a drug deal gone sour, but this afternoon...this afternoon a girl from one of the motel rooms got her hand stuck in the Coke machine. I heard her yelling, and I ran out there and she was screaming and her hand was up under that plastic flap that the Coke bottle falls out of, y'know? She'd reached under it because her Coke didn't fall out like it was supposed to, and she said a hand inside the machine grabbed her."
His fingers began to shake, and he dropped his car keys. Spike picked them up and gave them back to him without a word.
"I thought she must have been high on something, but I went ahead and opened the Coke machine up anyway so she could see that there wasn't nothin' in there. There's not room for anyone to be in there; shit, it's full top to bottom and side to side with bottles and racks and cogs and the coin box and there's just no WAY!" Tears dripped down the bartender's cheeks. He put his hand over his mouth and looked as if he were on the verge of throwing up.
"C'mon, Mate. I'll drive you home in your car, and my lady'll follow in ours. You're in no bloody shape to be behind a wheel."
The bartender nodded gratefully and handed his keys back to Spike. "I'll call in sick tomorrow. I've got some sick days comin'; I'm gonna have to call in sick. I can't come back here."