“How do you like that, sweetie? Does it tickle?”
It was a high, fluting voice that cracked on sweetie and tickle. Otherwise it was weirdly familiar, and after a moment I realized why. It sounded like Christopher Polley. I knew it couldn’t be, but it sure did.
I started forward again, stopping as soon as I could see into the dip on the other side of the rise. I had seen some strange things in this other world, but nothing so strange as a child sitting in the dust with a hand clamped around the back legs of a cricket. It was the biggest I’d seen so far, and red instead of black. In his other hand the child held what looked like a dagger with a short blade and a cracked haft held together with string.
He was too absorbed in what he was doing to see us. He stuck the cricket in its belly, producing a tiny spurt of blood. Until then I didn’t know crickets could bleed. There were other droplets in the dirt, which suggested the kid had been at this nasty business for some time.
“Like that, honey?” The cricket lunged, but with its back legs hobbled, the kid pulled it back easily. “How about a little in your—”
Radar barked. The kid looked around, not losing his hold on the big cricket’s back legs, and I saw he wasn’t a kid but a dwarf. And old. White hair straggled down his cheeks in clumps. His face was lined, the ones bracketing his mouth so deep that he looked like the kind of ventriloquist’s dummy Leah could have used （if she wasn’t pretending her horse could talk, that was）。 His face wasn’t doing that melting thing, but his skin was the color of clay. And he still reminded me of Polley, partly because he was small but mostly because of the slyness in his face. Given that sly look added to what he was doing, I could easily imagine him capable of murdering a limping old jeweler.
“Who are you?” No fear, because I was at some distance and silhouetted against the sky. He hadn’t seen the gun yet.
“What are you doing?”
“I caught this fella. It was quick, but old Peterkin was quicker. I’m trying to see if it feels pain. God knows I do.”
He prinked the cricket again, this time between two plates of its carapace. The red cricket bled and struggled. I started pulling the cart down the hill. Radar gave another bark. She was still standing with her legs braced on the board at its front.
“Curb your dog, sonny. I would, if I was you. If she comes a-near me, I’ll cut his throat.”
I set down the poles and drew Mr. Bowditch’s .45 from the holster for the first time. “You won’t cut her or me. Stop doing that. Let it go.”
The dwarf—Peterkin—regarded the gun with puzzlement rather than fright. “Now why would you want me to do that? I’m only having a little fun in a world where there’s hardly any left.”
“You’re torturing it.”
Peterkin looked amazed. “Torture, you say? Torture? Oh you idiot, it’s a damn inseck. You can’t torture an inseck! And why would you care?”
I cared because watching him hold the thing’s jumping legs, its only means of escape, while he poked it again and again, was ugly and cruel.
“I won’t tell you twice.”
He laughed, and he even sounded a little like Polley, with his ha-ha interjections. “Shoot me over an inseck? I don’t think s—”
I aimed high and to the left and pulled the trigger. The report was much louder than it had been from inside Mr. Bowditch’s shed. Radar barked. The dwarf jerked in surprise and let go of the cricket. It hopped away into the grass, but crookedly. The damned little man had lamed it. Only an inseck, but that didn’t make what this Peterkin had been doing right. And how many red crickets had I seen? Only this one. They were probably as rare as albino deer.
The dwarf got up and dusted off the seat of his bright green britches. He swept the ragged clumps of his white hair back like a concert pianist getting ready to play his big number. Leaden skin or no leaden skin, he seemed lively enough. Lively as a cricket, so to speak. And while he’d never sing on American Idol, he had a lot more voice than most people I’d met in the last twenty-four hours, and his face was all present and accounted for. Other than being a dwarf （“Never call them midgets, they hate it,” my dad told me once） and having a shitty complexion that could have used a shot of Otezla, he seemed pretty much okay.
“I see that you are an irritable boy,” he said, looking at me with disgust, and maybe （I hoped so） just a trace of fear. “So why don’t I go my way and you go yours.”
“That sounds good, but I want to ask you something before we part company. How come your face is more or less normal, and so many other folks seem to be getting uglier all the time?”