One-Eyed Jack Read Online Free PDF Page B

be a supernatural
creature of some sort, not really human at all. No, I don’t know
who she is, or where to find her, or why she would bite off a kid’s
finger. Yes, I dreamed this, I have no actual evidence. Yes, I
guess I’m a psychic, but not one you ever heard of. I’ve never been
on TV, I’ve never worked with the police or anyone official, and I
don’t know a thing about your town. I’ve lived pretty much my
entire life in Maryland.”
    Yeah, that would go over
well.
    But I couldn’t sit home and do
nothing, either. I’d tried that. It didn’t end well. I had dreamed
about the man who killed my mother, and I didn’t do anything
because I thought they were just nightmares. I had dreamed about
the cop who decided I must have killed Mrs. Reinholt, and if I’d
paid more attention I might have avoided some of that mess and
graduated high school.
    Or maybe I wouldn’t have
avoided a thing; I doubt I could have ever convinced him of the
truth. I saw the thing that killed Mrs. Reinholt – I didn’t dream
about that, since I already knew her, but I saw that thing, and
even spoke with it, after a fashion, but how would I have ever made
anyone else believe me? They couldn’t see it, even if it had hung
around.
    I hadn’t known what to do. I wasn’t
even completely sure yet that what I saw was real; I thought I
might be hallucinating.
    I wish I had been hallucinating.
I wish those dreams had just been nightmares. And I wish I had done something. My
mother might still be alive. Mrs. Reinholt might still be alive.
Mel might not be calling herself the queen of despair, and she and
I might have graduated with the rest of our class.
    I didn’t ignore the dreams again,
ever. They weren’t always about terrible things – I saw Nancy in my
dreams before Dad even met her, and she’s not a bad person – but
they were always important. If I hadn’t had dreams to warn me, I
might have handled Dad’s new girlfriend even worse than I did. The
dreams I had about the guy who used to own Mel’s house had helped
me deal with that mess, and might have kept Mel out of jail – or
kept her from unleashing several kinds of Hell on the cops. So I
didn’t ignore the dreams.
    For the most part I did ignore the
things I saw that other people didn’t – there were just too many of
them, and most of them were harmless, and anyway I didn’t know any
way to stop the ones that weren’t. If they were really determined
to hurt someone, and they were able to do it, there was nothing I
could do. Usually, the night-things couldn’t touch humans any more
than humans could touch them – but there were exceptions. When I
spotted the exceptions, I would try to chase them off. Sometimes
just letting them know they’d been seen was enough to drive them
away.
    Sometimes it wasn’t. The thing that
killed Mrs. Reinholt knew I saw it, and it hadn’t cared. It didn’t
think I could stop it. It didn’t think I could hurt it.
    It had been right – but
maybe if I’d done something sooner, I could have frightened it
away. Maybe if I’d warned Mrs, Reinholt, she could have stopped
it.
    But I didn’t, and she died.
    So now, if one of the
creatures looked dangerous, I’d try to do something. Oh, I didn’t
go out looking for them, in fact I tended to stay indoors after
dark as much as possible, but when I did see one trying to hurt someone,
I didn’t ignore it.
    I didn’t know if I could stop whatever
had chewed off Jack’s finger, but I intended to try.
    But first I had to find it, and the
only link to it that I had was Jack Wilson, who was in Kentucky and
who didn’t seem eager to talk, but who I could watch in my
dreams.
    I was going to meet Jack eventually; I
knew he was the one because he was the only one who was in all my
recent dreams. The rest of the family had been in most of them, but
in the one during my break room nap there had only been Jack and
the mystery woman, so Jack had to be the key. I was going to meet
him, and if my