A TAIL OF NINE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: The Devil of it All

The Tengu haven't found us but once they do, they'll be on us like ugly on ape (it's one of Mr. Unger's favorite sayings, along with I'll get in your eye like an onion). Even though we're harder to track, that doesn't mean impossible.

King's ears perk up and he makes a chuffing sound in the back of his throat.

"Me and King's nose'll get us to where we need to be."

"Before they find us?" Then I add, pointing at one of the houses, "Do you know anybody around here that would let us in?"

"I'm the only one that's damn fool enough to open his door after dark."

I start to say something but he only tells me to hush up. He stares up at the sky, squinting. Following his gaze, all I see is stars.

"To find a short-cut, you just have to know what you're looking for. Hell, all you have to do is look. Places like that want to be found. They're aching for it."

"A short-cut?"

"Hush!" He gets ready to snarl something else to me, but his mouth splits into a smile. "There!"

And I see what he was looking for. There's a blue haze in the sky. The longer I look at it, the more I can see a glowing core. Then the cloud seems to change shape. Thin, glowing tendrils spiral down from it, making it look like a jellyfish. They look like they come all the way down from the cloud to ground, though I can't make out where, not yet. But apparently, wherever they end up, that's where we're going.

Mr. Unger swears under his breath as we cut through several yards, heading toward the woods that have overtaken this part of town and the old Constitution Park (at least that's what I remember it being called). Walking down the street might be faster than winding our way through the forest, but if the Widow Boys and the Tengu are gonna find us anyway, then we're gonna make them work for it.

With his nose glued to the ground, King keeps going. When he zigzags, we do the same.

In the distance, I think I hear a screech. Coulda been a car tire. Please, don't be a Tengu.

I want those things shredded. I want Mirabelle on her knees, begging for mercy.

More than anything, I want to be able to keep up with that hound dog. It's like that King is turbo charged! When Mr. Unger stops to catch his breath, the dog instinctively stops and glances. I let the old man lean on me. I'm not leaving his side. Maybe I'm learning a few things from King after all.

Suddenly the fur between King's shoulders rises up like a fin.

"Get your gun ready," I say. After rooting around on the forest floor, I grab a stick. If the Tengu and Widow Boys get us, it'll be after a fight that they'll regret.

"Most things 'round here, shoot 'em and you just piss 'em off," Mr. Unger says, scanning the darkness with squinted eyes.

After about ten more minutes, we end up at where the blue thing in the sky touches the town. They cascade down a building that looks to be about a million years old. He doesn't stop there, but I do. The old Casco Ice factory towers above everything, a skinny pillar stretching up toward the night sky. I can't keep from staring at the red brick behemoth. And it stares back at me. I don't know how they did it, but somebody's painted a sprawling mosaic on the side of it. The pale, monotone woman's eyes stab right through me. Tangles of vines and tulips have been drawn to frame her while a cluster of little orange butterflies have been painted in the lower left corner. The woman in the painting has that look in her eyes, that starved, sad look of a thing that knows it's decaying ... It's like somehow, after the war, the town became this woman. Whoever painted this, looked inside this town and drew the haunted thing staring back.