The Amulet. A.R. Morlan

woman of indeterminate race (some in town said Indian, others were sure she was Mexican, while still others, namely Bitsy Nemmitz and Pearl Vincent, swore that the woman was what they called a light “Nag-ro”), nor was he planning to do much of a reconstruction job on her come morning. He wasn’t going to let his wife Susie affix false white-blonde hair (from the assortment of many-hued hanks she kept in an old tackle box) to cover the wide-shaved swath that resembled a reverse Mohawk on the dead woman’s scalp, nor was he planning to use makeup, wax, or Hydrol tissue builder to fill in the long ragged claw marks that grooved her faintly black-stubbled dark scalp.

      And Susie wasn’t going to put any fresh nail polish on those cat claws of Inez’s, either—not a single drop from the dozens of half-empty bottles she kept close to his embalming supplies.

      Considering what Inez had done to Uncle Cooper (when­ever someone treated the heavy-set gentleman badly, he became “Uncle Cooper”; otherwise, he was better known around town as “The Happy Wanderer,” or, in the Reish household, as “Your nutty uncle”), the dead woman was lucky to be getting embalmed at all, let alone buried at county expense, or so Craig Reish had decided upon viewing the now naked remains of Mrs. Hibbing when Lenny brought them over that after­noon.

      He’d grunted over the carelessly black-sutured chest as Lenny explained about her heart attack, thinking, Heart attack, fart attack. I only hope you suffered, cunt, before assuring Lenny that he’d do everything possible for the deceased, before her ex-husband came back from his out-of-town trip the next afternoon.

      Watery brown eyes anxious, Lenny had said, “You’ll make her look nice, won’tcha, Craig? Her landlady sent over these clothes. Norm, he’s a jerk, but really a nice guy. You’ll do her up right, won’t you?”

      Craig was upstairs at that very moment, tossing under the covers in gleeful delight over the prospect of seeing Norm Hibbing’s farsighted blue eyes goggle out when Craig lifted the lid and exposed the neo-Punk corpse within, as he officiously explained that there was nothing else he could do on such short notice.

      And since Craig was so bent on revenge, and since old Doc Calder wasn’t the most observant family practitioner-cum-makeshift pathologist in Dean County (let alone Wisconsin), neither man—to both of whom the dead were nothing new, or exotic, or above all, frightening—had taken all that good of a look at the sets of long scratches on Inez Hibbing’s shorn scalp. For while the scratches were mostly close set, and in obvious paw arrangement, there were a few scratches here and there that were wider set, with ample space between the separate ragged wounds.

      Spaces roughly the width between human fingers, and fingernails.

      EIGHT—Dream Time

      “Don’t wanna have my picture taken.... I wanna open my presents!” little Anna cried. Mommy tried to hush her, but Gramma was listening, as she pretended to sleep under the big blue quilt, and before Mommy could grab Anna away from by the bed, Gramma’s hand snaked out from under the covers, nails curved in a horny yellowish line, and before Anna knew what had happened, Gramma’s claw-hand had raked her left cheek. Gramma hissed, “Woke me up, you little mutt.”

      And little Anna felt blood welling in the four jagged furrows on her cheek, and on her earlobe, where Gramma’s horny thumb had caught the tender nub of dangling flesh. Anna screamed, “No, Gramma, no!” but Gramma reached up and did it again, and every time the nails raked Anna’s cheek they felt like real claws, and Mommy didn’t do anything, but stare while Gramma hissed from under the covers, “Woke me up, woke me up.”

      Mommy put makeup over little Anna’s cheek once the blood was all gone, but the makeup felt all funny—not like the powder in the round compact at all. It was waxy, and smelled like something stale and dead, like when Great-Aunt Joan was in that box and old Mr. Byrne lifted her up to see the husk of a woman, and little Anna had to smile while she opened the gifts under the tree, for if she didn’t smile Gramma was gonna be mad, and do the flapping thing that even scared Mommy so bad she’d never admit it had ever happened, after it did, but little Anna wanted to cry, not smile, so suddenly Gramma came at her, all brown and wrinkled and fuzzy and flapping.

      The flapping noise in Anna’s bedroom was real. The snicking echoes filled her head when she woke up from her nightmare of Christmas of 1962—the time when the old lady had clawed up Anna’s cheeks.

      Real flapping, in this room, she thought, pulling her sheet closer to her chin. She felt the weight of the cats on her legs, but she was afraid to open her eyes—fraid of what she might half see against the dark ceiling and walls. She knew there were bats in the sealed-off attic and between the walls of the house; often the cats would sit for hours, listening to the walls. Somehow, one of those filthy things had knocked aside the ceiling tiles and squeezed through.

      There was no more flapping, not even the echo of a sound. Her cheek still carried the ache of the scratches and the makeup burning the sore furrows (weird, that I dreamed of mortician’s wax. Ma put Max Factor on my cheeks. You can see how dark they were in the pictures), and her eyes were actually tearing. Easing a hand out from under the covers, Anna rubbed her still-closed eyes, as she became aware that Bruiser was resting with his body crosswise to her, his bottom up against her right leg, his head facing the window.

      The window—that was it. Opening her moist eyes, Anna saw a faint patch of lightness against the dark wall. Bruiser had pulled his old trick again, pawing at her drawn shade until he created enough tension to raise it himself. Often, he was able to raise it only a foot or so, but occasionally, he could make it go all the way up to the top.

      She hadn’t taught him to do that; somehow, probably through feline observation and with the help of better than average cat smarts, Bruiser had figured out how to raise the light-filtering shade on his own.

      His trick had actually scared Ma; inexplicably, she found it utterly terrifying to think that a mere animal had the brains to perform a “human” task. It was around that time, in fact, that Ma claimed she hated the muscular black animal.

      “Whatcha see, huh, Brupie? Bunnies out there? Another cat?” Bruiser turned his massive head her way for a second, then resumed looking out the window. He’d butted the filmy curtain aside, and was staring intently at something in the backyard, following its movements with his broad, small-eared head. Tiny burbling sounds escaped his throat as he tensed up, butt wiggling against Anna’s leg.

      Curious, she leaned forward at the waist and put her hand on Bruiser’s smooth back, asking softly, “What is it? The neighbors? What do you see?” as if she fully expected the cat to supply her with a rational answer.

      Her own night vision wasn’t the best; unlike her mother, Anna needed at least a few street lamps, or even full moon­light, to see reasonably well in the dark, and thus she kept a small but fairly powerful flashlight under her pillow, just in case the cats started acting up. Usually, all she had to do was train the light on them and they’d quiet down. Staring into her dark, tree- and shrub-filled backyard was almost totally useless without the flashlight, since all she could initially make out was the faint sheen of moonlight on frosty ground, and bulking shapes of foliage—until she aimed the flashlight into the yard, and saw what had captured Bruiser’s attention.

      Something dark and small—quite small, in fact—was moving fluidly across the yard on a northwest diagonal. Against the faint paleness of the frosty grass and leaves, all Anna could make out was a vague sense of thin legs crisscross­ing, below a body that refused to come into focus. But her flashlight’s beam captured one detail—an all-too-brief glimmer of color against the surrounding maw of blackness that comprised the creature’s head.

      A reflected glow of green-brown, roundish and fast­-moving, as if the head had turned in her direction, then turned away again—a blink-and-you-miss-it movement that had lasted just long enough for her to register one disquieting, irrational fact.

      She had seen the glow of three eyes on that formless head. And for no good reason, she remembered what Lenny Wilkes others had said in the Rusty Hinge about that Inez shrew being clawed by an animal, perhaps being frightened into a heart attack by some strange beast.

      If three eyes