Afterlife (27 page)

She rose up, keeping her back to the door. “I don’t know,” she said, trembling. “You have this ability. I know you do. I don’t know what to think. I just don’t. What if you’re lying? What if you can show me things that never happened?”

He pressed his hands to his forehead, as if he were stopping a headache. “Don’t doubt me. Please, Julie. It’s important. I’m here with you because I knew what you were going through. When you came to me, and I went inside you, I knew the pain you’d felt. I knew the desolation. It’s because your marriage was a lie. He used you. He is still using you.”

“He’s dead. My husband is dead,” she said, angrily. She stepped around him and went toward the kitchen. “I need time. I need time to think.”

“There’s no time,” he said. “They’ve already tested others.”

She half turned, stopping. “What do you mean?”

“Your children,” he said. “They have some of their father in them. They have the genetic material for Ability X. You know that your stepson has things he can’t express. You know that your daughter thinks she has a brain radio. That she communicates with her father. Some of them have already murdered their own children, trying to resurrect them. Do you think your children are safe?”

Julie glanced upstairs to the bedrooms. “Stop it. Please. If that’s true. My God, if that’s true, then why didn’t Hut just come here and take them? Why all these months…” She tried to block out the videos she’d seen.
That’s insane. It was your mind. It was stress. Posttraumatic stress. Eleanor called it that. Shock. Shock of having your husband murdered. Shock and despair and anger and grief and mourning and cracks in your mind where you fall off a cliff of life and dangle from a thin branch over a chasm. Nervous exhaustion. Night fears. Erotic dreams. Rape dreams. Short-circuiting in the face of an enormous shock. That’s what it was. This is insane.

“You don’t come back all at once,” he said. “First, your autonomous nervous system kicks in when Ability X turns on another part of the brain. Then, it takes weeks before your memories come back. And they only come back if others with the Ability are there to bring them into you. To get inside the Stream with you. To re-open the doors that have been closed. But you’ve seen him. In your dreams. In the movies in your head. The movies on screen. He is blasphemy, Julie. He violated the sacredness of death. He violates the soul. He does not believe in the soul. He puts himself above the laws of nature, which are here for a reason, Julie. It’s what I learned in my death. If I could take away my life now, I would. I’ve tried. But I can’t. Only when my brain itself breaks down, will I finally find release and enter the Stream that connects us all. And then my soul will go where it is meant to and not be shackled by this body. I wish I could make it untrue, Julie,” he said, getting up from the floor. He came toward her. “I wish I could say I made it all up. That I’m just a murderer. That I murdered your husband and I’m here to hurt you. But it’s not true.”

“Don’t come near me. Please,” she said, feeling an immense ache within her.

“You’re feeling separation from me. It’s all right,” he said. “It passes. It’s what we feel when we’re too much within another. You don’t have Ability X strongly enough. Everyone has it to some small degree. Your husband has it greater than anyone I’ve ever known. You seem to have perhaps three percent. A drop of it. But it’s enough to make you ache when you separate from going inside someone in the Stream. It’s what we all feel,” he said, and as he went toward her she slowly moved back, through the doorway into the kitchen. “I learned something in my death, Julie. I learned about the soul. And death is the sacred doorway. I should not have been pulled back into life. I should not have come back into my burnt body. But they were there, and they got inside the Stream, and they drew me back because I was their experiment. I was their guinea pig. But I came back better. They don’t always. Sometimes, they come back violent. Sometimes, they show up with nothing but evil in them. Sometimes, they come back as a child who can’t learn right, who can’t remember, who can’t express himself, who gets angry and violent and pulls knives.”

She stared at him, angry now. “Matt? Matty?”

“He killed him. When he was only three. That was too young. But he doesn’t care, Julie. It was a test. I know, because his wife came to me. Amanda. She came to me and she was losing her mind with fury for what she’d allowed them to do.”

“Matty? He’s not dead. He’s in his room, sleeping. He’ll wake up soon.”

“She told me that she fought him—your husband— to make him stop. But the problem with what they do, Julie, is they want fear. Fear makes the adrenaline pump. Fear makes them come back. It wakes up a part of the brain after one part of it turns off. Fear is a switch. It gets the Ability going at hyperspeed. They need that. It opens a door that should be permanently sealed in the brain. It turns on something. When one part of the brain diminishes, another part begins to rewire and come alive. Do you know how they did it to that little threeyear-old boy? Do you?”

“He doesn’t have the carving,” Julie said, her eyes watering up with tears and she went to the knife block and pulled out a long sharp knife. She held it up, more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

“Amanda stopped them from carving into his skin after he was dead. But before he died, they had to frighten that little three-year-old. They had to do something so terrible to him, Julie, that his system would go into shock. And then they drowned him. They made his own mother do it. Your husband made his wife wrap her hands around the boy’s neck and press him into a bathtub and the fear was like electricity so that even she felt it. But he had some of the Ability. He came back. But he didn’t come back without something not right. That’s what they do, Julie. They think that they’re changing the world. They think by doing this, they’ll eradicate death. They’ll close the door of death. But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes the body rots. Three days are crucial. If the mind does not awaken in three days, corruption sets in, and it’s too late. If the brain doesn’t turn on, then natural death occurs. But they stay inside them for three days. They stayed inside me for three days after the fire. They made sure I turned on and came back from the dead. And they did it with your husband. And his son.”

“Hut saw her. That’s not true,” Julie said. “He saw her. He told me. He said she was trying to kill him. When he was eleven.”

“Maybe she was trying to send him where his soul had been meant to go,” Diamond said. “Julie, there’s no time now. I want to ask that you and your children come with me. I’ll protect them. They can’t really hurt me. They can’t do anything to you once you’ve died and come back.”

“No,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the back of her left hand. She held the knife up, sobbing. “Matty’s a good boy. He’s good. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“It doesn’t make you bad,” Diamond said. “But there are no guarantees how we come back. None. Nobody understands how the brain—and mind—work, Julie. Nobody understands the enormous part of our minds that is untapped. They play with fire. They murder and call it understanding.”

“That’s insane. You’re talking insane. This is not real. This is not happening. Please, just leave. Just go. I…I’m confused. I don’t…I don’t want this. Please.” She tried to reach for the phone on the counter by the sink, but wasn’t quite there. He stepped toward her, and she jabbed the knife in the air.

“We’ve been inside each other. You know this is true. You know it.”

“Stop saying that! It’s obscene. It’s disgusting. He’s dead. You killed him. Please. Why don’t you leave? Why don’t you leave?”

“I know you won’t stab me,” he said, stepping closer. “I’ve been inside you. I know you, inside and out. I know.”

“Don’t, please,” she sobbed, slashing at the air, less than a foot from him, crumbling to the floor, wishing the world would disappear, wishing she could feel safe again.

“There’s something I need, Julie. You know where they are. But they blocked you. But I can unblock it inside you. I just need to go find that door. I need just a little time to find that door. I can stop them for good, Julie. Inside you, you have a memory. You’ve been to where they’re giving their tests.”

“66S? Is that what this is about?”

“No,” he said. “That was a young woman’s apartment. A woman I knew. Her father had been friends with my father, and he gave her the apartment after it was converted into units. A woman named Gina Lambert. Another one of us. But she was the daughter of a girl named Nell who had been in Project Daylight. Her mother was one of them. And they got her. They killed her to test her. They killed a boy named Terry West. He was still in college. He had Ability X. Do you want to know how? They had to create great fear in him before he died. But he still died. He didn’t come back. Do you want to know how monstrous they are?”

“I don’t know anything, I don’t.”

“Let me inside you one last time. Just one last time,” he said, “Please let me get inside you.”

She jabbed the knife at him, almost touching his skin. “No, please, no.”

“There’s a place inside you. I know it’s there. We were almost there. Almost. I almost found it. If you can let me in, I can stop them. I know I can. There’s always hope. It’s a blessing and a curse. But sometimes, it’s all we have. Yet, when faced with this, there is no hope. There can be no hope. Do not let hope cloud your resolve. Help me find them. Help me open that one door in your mind.”

“Please,” she wept, slashing blindly, “Go away. I don’t want this. It’s not happening!”

He reached out and touched the edge of the knife, and then the tips of her fingers. “Let me inside you, Julie.”

She felt a spark between them, and a lubricating familiarity as he slid into her and she shut her eyes for just a moment and felt him moving, and now she tried to resist but he was pushing her hard, slamming up against her on the inside, his consciousness roaming and tearing at walls and doors and things that she felt were the tunnels into her memory.

And then she saw it at the moment he did.

It was simply a house.

It was a house with glass walls on one side.

She had seen it before but she wasn’t sure where. She could not name whose it was. She vaguely remembered a video of Matt’s that was just a house on a lake. On the lake, she thought. Their lake. Somewhere right here. Somewhere in Rellingford. On the lake. She remembered the rich people’s houses across the lake, and felt as he searched her memory for who owned this house and why she was there, and she saw a woman coming to the door as she stood out in the side yard looking at the brown lake, and she turned to see the woman more clearly, but the image was out of focus and she almost had a name…

And then something exploded. She felt a sudden rush of wind inside the Stream. Diamond was no longer there with her. She opened her eyes.

At first she thought the noise was from outside the windows, a cherry bomb blast.

She looked at Michael Diamond’s face. He wore an expression of shock.

He tried to reach around to his back.

He fell hard on the floor.

Behind him, Hut.

She felt the world spinning around her. She saw Michael Diamond wriggling and then trying to crawl. She stared at him. Looked up at Hut. She looked at Hut as if she’d never seen him before. Trying to comprehend. Trying to make it all make sense to her. Reason was gone. She knew Michael Diamond. She knew him. She didn’t know Hut. She had never known Hut. He had hidden from her. He had…used her?
For what? For making a child? Another child? Another test to pass? Livy? With her brain radio? Was that it? Were they all making children? Stealing children? With Ability X? That’s insane. It couldn’t be. Why? What purpose? Why kill them? Why do it? Hut can’t be here. It has to be like the movies. It has to be just me. How is it possible? But she remembered the feeling within the Stream. She could not deny that. She had felt…wonderful and terrified, as if it were something that…her soul had known existed. Diamond believed in the soul. The human soul, inviolate. Not to be violated. Not to be played with. The soul’s journey along the Stream after death. After life. Beyond life.

Something in her brain began to fade, as if she no longer could tell the difference between dream and reality, and words and images came up to her, trying to draw her back from what she saw in front of her, trying to make her close her eyes, and return to the Stream that Michael Diamond had taken her into with him.

Hut stood there in a white shirt and khakis, the revolver from the metal box in his hand.

“Don’t scream,” he said, softly. “The kids are probably waking up now. They heard the shot. Even the neighbors, although it’ll take a little while to identify where this came from. Shhh.” Then he bent down and took the knife from Julie’s fingers, and put his foot against Michael Diamond’s throat. “Look at him. He’s dying. But he can’t die. But he can suffer. He can go towards death. But in three days, he’ll come back. Once you pass the test, Julie, you can’t die ever again.” Then he leaned closer to Julie. She could feel his breath, which was sweet. “If you let me inside you now, I can take all the pain away,” he said.

She stared at him, feeling as if she were surrounded by ice.

“This is shock,” he whispered, stroking the side of her face gently. “Do you want me inside you?” Hut asked. “If you let me inside you, Julie, I can take away hurt.”

She felt his consciousness come into her and suddenly, she felt sleepy and tired as if she’d been given a sedative. He was stroking her on the inside, altering the pain, softening her confusion, making her black out.

As she sank down into a dark oblivion, she thought of Livy and Matt, and she wanted to claw her way up from the darkness for their sakes.
Please Livy. Please Matt. Don’t let him touch you. Don’t let your Daddy near you. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know if I’m really here or if my mind is gone. Please God help my children. Please Michael. Please someone. Hut please don’t hurt them. Don’t let this be happening.