The Amulet. A.R. Morlan

to Papa.

      Anna knew she was safe as long as she stayed in bed, with the comforting warmth and weight of the cats on her legs, but she still felt vulnerable, violated—there was a whatever roaming her yard, and there was always the possibility that it would come right up to the window and peer in at her.

      As if intuiting her fears, Bruiser began to growl, a low rumble deep in his chest that woke Mouth up. Soon the window was crowded with cats, blotting out the view through the bottom fifth of the window—but not enough that Anna couldn’t see the dark shape pause, turn her way again, and quite obviously hiss, the dim moonlight glinting off the incisors within the ill-defined mouth.

      And in that instant, Anna saw where the third “eye” was. It wasn’t in line with the real eyes, but situated lower down, close to the mouth. It was a tag, a damned rabies tag, twin to the ones Anna had for both of her cats—a green cut-out bell shape with a hole poked in the top. But the tags were over an inch in diameter, and quite wide at the bottom, while this spot of green luminescence was small—only slightly bigger than a cat’s real eye.

      Reflexively, Anna got up on her knees and reached up to pull down her shade, telling herself, It’s an address tag, like they sell at the vet’s office. Some of those are tiny little circles of metal or plastic. No, don’t think plastic, it doesn’t reflect like that.

      The shade safely in place, Anna flopped back down on the bed and pulled her covers over her, not even daring to poke her head out again when Bruiser began to paw at the shade frantically.

      In the morning, she thought, I’ll go back there and see what kind of tracks the thing left, even as she prayed that it would turn warm overnight and thaw the delicate frost on the soil.

      NINE—Arlene (2)

      Much like her fellow Dumpster diver Anna Sudek, Arlene Campbell was asleep, dreaming, as her cats crowded around her bedroom window, peering out through the drawn chintz curtains at the strange wandering beast scampering on the lawn below. Hers too was a worried sleep, with awful dreams; a dripping Inez Hibbing, dirty-nailed fingers clutching long tufts of her shorn-at-the-scalp brittle hair, was waiting on Arlene in the store her ex-husband owned, even though Arlene told the woman she’d much rather have Norm handle the ringing up of her purchases.

      But Inez was nonplused. Using her bloody, hair-wound fingers, she punched up the numbers on the till, as the dying fluorescent light above made the bare swath of scalp between the bloody, tangled lengths of blonde hair over her ears and neck gleam in the dingy, musty store.

      And even when that Sudek girl, Anna, came in from the back room where she’d been stocking new merchandise, Inez wouldn’t let her ring up Arlene’s order, even though she begged the walking corpse to let Anna handle it.

      “Don’t you know? I’m going to fire her,” Inez’s corpse said, without moving its clawed lips. “I don’t want no murderer’s relative working in my store,” and then the display window crashed in a shimmer of ice chips and clear confetti, bringing with it a small, dark-furred thing with widespread claws and three glowing, baleful eyes.

      And just as Arlene passed from the nightmare into wakefulness, she noticed that the outstretched paws of the sleek dark thing were covered with what looked like pressed face powder.

      Snorting, pawing at her face with trembling hands, Arlene sat up in bed, mumbling, “No...oh, please, no,” for as the hyper-colored dream images left her mind, one last detail filtered into her consciousness—the face of the blackish beast.

      It was fur-covered, and chinless in the way of small beasts, but it was not the face of an animal—oh, no, not at all. Like a small child wearing a cat mask, the eyes of knowledge, of calculated intent, shone through the painted gauze over the eyeholes.

      And as she covered her mouth with shaking hands, Arlene Campbell remembered exactly which face she’d just seen all fur-skinned and fangs out in the nightmare novelty shop—a face well-known to little Arlene Weiss and her playmates, from over fifty years ago.

      Worse than the dream, and worse than the remembering, was the knowledge that the owner of that pinched, crafty child’s face was still alive.

      It was then Arlene noticed that all her cats were crowded in the window, watching the yard. Being much older than Anna Sudek, it wasn’t so easy for her to bend at the waist to get a good look out the window as she sat in the bed; she had to get up and shuffle around the footboard to look out the window. Past Silky’s huge ears, and Puff and Fluff’s round Persian heads, she saw a dark shape gliding across the lawn, leaving definite dark impressions in the crunchy white grass.

      If her Don had still been alive, he would have charged out the door, shotgun in hand, ready to blow off the beast’s nebulous head, and never mind the law against shooting inside city limits. He was Don Campbell, scourge of the city works crew, master of the snowplow and the street sweeper, king of the pickup trucks, wasn’t he?

      And while Arlene had never shared her husband’s temper, she did have a healthy sense of curiosity, that same sense of needing to know that had led her to find the body that morning, and later to phone in that hankie-muffled report of the incident, because she simply had to know what had happened (not that she bought that heart attack story—Clive Calder couldn’t tell an anus from an aorta).

      In the darkness, she felt for her clothes and put them on, easing her shoes over her bare feet before she hurried downstairs and outside, flashlight in hand. Sure enough, something dark and darting was in the yard. Arlene saw it, and it saw her—with all three of its eyes.

      “Shoo!” she warbled, clapping her free hand against her thigh. The beast took off on an angle to the north, skidding across the frost-slippery grass. Not bothering to see where it went, Arlene shone her flashlight at the creature’s tracks across her lawn. They were cat prints, or maybe skunk. Only, not exactly right, either, for the gait was all wrong, as if it had been trying to walk en pointe on its paws, in a vaguely human, pattern not quite like that of a cat or a skunk.

      And farther away from her, on her neighbor’s lawn, actually, the print became different—almost dog-size. When she saw the odd prints (That can’t be. Things get smaller when they’re farther away—don’t they?), Arlene thumbed off her light and hurried back into her house, knees protesting all the way, and slammed the door behind her with a shotgun-loud report of aged wood hitting aged wood. But if Arlene had decided to follow the strange tracks leading away from her house, she would have been very puzzled to see that they changed once more—for one step, to the scrabbly claw of a bird, and then there was nothing at all to mar the white-rimed grass below.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Tuesday, October 20, 1987

      ONE—Bib (1)

      As Anna heard the car pull up and come to a stop behind her, and saw the shadow of the gumball machine on top of the vehicle, she thought, Why me, huh? Terry Von Kemp two days in a row is too much to—until she heard a different, more nasal voice ask:

      “You’re Tina Miner’s girl, aren’t you?”

      Anna’s hand stopped in mid-grasp around a half frozen grapefruit in the IGA dumpster. Bib Stanley was speaking. He was Ewerton’s chief of police, up until now only a disembodied voice to Anna, whose prerecorded warnings about skate­boarding on the sidewalks and driving through the city parks played daily on WERT, AM and FM. Anna hadn’t even realized that he pulled patrol duty like the other officers.

      Not thinking it proper to turn around to face the chief with garbage in hand, Anna reluctantly let go of the grapefruit. She couldn’t do anything about the other five already in her bag. If Chief Stanley didn’t like it, he was welcome to make a reservation for her in the vertical-bar suite of the Ewerton Hilton.

      “Uh...yeah. Yes. I’m her daughter, Anna Sudek.”

      “You married?” Chief Stanley had the interior lights turned off. Little of the light from the wall-mounted flood above the Dumpsters reached his face or body, save for a wedge of beard-stubbled chin.

      “No. My mother was, though.” Chief