Darkness of the Soul (44 page)

Drakanis felt a deepening lethargy inside, and his head began to nod. He was having difficulty maintaining focus. Part of him knew that something was wrong, that drifting off here would be one of the worst things he could do in his life. None of that seemed to matter, though. He blinked at Joey, his head falling to a natural tilt, and tried to break through it enough to speak.

“What… mercy?”

The Beast shook its head. “Removal of pain. I would have thought that obvious by now.”

It was getting harder and harder to even keep his eyes open, let alone form coherent thoughts. He felt murky inside, almost drugged. Nothing seemed to be making proper connections in his head, and he was still reeling from what the Beast had told him.
If
it
means
it
 
.
 
.
 
.

“I often forget how literal you humans can be. Always wanting things spelled out for you. Very well.”

Joey hopped down from his chair, walked to the center of the room, and stood directly under the fluorescent lighting. As he passed beneath it, his features flickered for a moment, seemed to twist into a death’s head with worms crawling in the eye sockets and all the flesh on his neck gone black and purple. The image faded almost as quickly as it had come, and Drakanis wasn’t sure if he had really seen it at all; the image of his son standing there with arms wide as if beckoning was the one that stayed with him. It was growing difficult to focus on Joey—or whatever had replaced him—because tears were welling in his eyes. Gina set down her paper, and on her way to join Joey, she laid a hand on Drakanis’s shoulder, gave it a squeeze, and then brought the hand up to caress his cheek, and he felt whatever sense of resistance or will he might have had fade away before the simple desire to have them back, even if only for a moment.

Gina joined Joey in the puddle of light in the middle of the kitchen, laying her hands on his shoulders and looking at Drakanis with questioning eyes. Joey managed a smile, full of emotions no child should know. Contemptuous amusement topped the list as he spoke again.

“Karesh is a failure. Only one can grant me my rebirth: you. You give me what I want, you receive what you want: your family, returned to you, forever.”

Drakanis’s tears were flowing freely now; it no longer mattered to him that this—
all
of this, so far as he knew—was nothing but a dream, a phantasm conjured up from his deepest hopes and dreams. All that mattered was the possibility. He slid from his chair and crawled on hands and knees toward his family.

Chapter
40
 

12:00 pm, December 24, 1999

Parker eased out of the hotel room and closed the door behind him. He leaned back against it and slid to the floor, trying to block out the garish pink and yellow walls along with the images of what he had seen inside. Banishing the inner demons that were still mocking him, telling him that he had been too late, proved to be much harder; the singsong chant in his head continued to go around and around, speeding up and laughing at him in what sounded like a hundred languages and voices at once.

He had been so goddamned sure of himself, certain that he could do something about this, certain that everything was going to turn out all right. When he had started jogging up the stairs—Taeda’s last hurrah had apparently shorted out the power to the elevators too—heading for the eighth floor, guided by the internal compass that the mysterious spectral benefactor had seen fit to embed in his skull, he had thought there was still time.

He supposed he should have paid better attention to what the voice had told him. It was only now, as he leaned against the door and tried not to think about what he’d found, that he recalled it had told him that Damien was basically already screwed. Even with that warning and the fact that he hadn’t particularly liked Woods—the smarmy, know-it-all looks and the habit he had of disappearing when actual work became involved had turned Parker off almost immediately—he hadn’t been truly prepared for what he had found.

By the time he got up to the eighth floor hallway and stepped out of the stairwell, he had become aware of some kind of strange sound. It was almost like screaming, but it seemed to be hitting him more on a mental level than a physical one. He supposed that made a certain amount of sense, since he could barely hear his own footfalls on the stairs. He had picked up the pace, charging down the hall like a bull and slamming into the door at full force, not knowing or caring how he knew which one to pick.

The scream had cut off seconds before he hit the door. By the time he had rebounded the first time and threw himself at it again, he’d been in silence for ten or fifteen seconds already. On the third try, when the door finally gave in, part of him had already decided that whatever had happened in the room was already over. He just had never been very good at listening to the pessimistic side of himself, even when it was correct.

The room had looked as though a small-scale hurricane had torn through it on a brief vacation from Florida. The tiny kitchenette was a domain of shattered glass and torn confetti that might have been some businessman’s paperwork before Karim or one of his little slaves had taken over the room. The living room hadn’t fared any better. At first, all Parker could see of it was the ruined remains of one of the dozens of obnoxious purple chairs that seemed to fill every room in the building, still smoldering, and the shattered picture frames and windows. For a moment, he was glad of his (hopefully) temporary deafness, because some inner awareness told him that the scream he had been hearing out in the hall had been the source of this wreckage. While he doubted it could have done much to a human body, especially not through one of the thick doors that guarded hotel residents from the nuts outside, Parker still found himself slightly glad that the noise had been deadened and had stopped by the time he came crashing in.

He spent several minutes prodding through everything—even checking the toilet tank in the bathroom—and finding nothing at all. Finally, he closed his eyes, shutting out both the overlay of colors—in there, it was almost solid red and wasn’t helpful at all anyway—and his normal sight. All that was left was darkness and silence, leaving him better able to focus on what he needed.

“If you’re listening, give me a hand here. I’m running blind, boss.”

Parker’s voice was strained, the words forced out against his grain. He wasn’t the type to ask for help from strangers—or from anyone, really, with only rare exceptions—and invader in his head or not, he definitely considered the giver of gifts to be a stranger of the highest caliber. He was about ready to give up; even the magnetic tugging that had brought him up there seemed to have gone on vacation. Then the voice came again, though only in his mind.

Look
again,
Vincent.

He opened his eyes, and no longer saw the room as he had a moment ago. The destruction was gone, but what had replaced it made even less sense. The carpet wasn’t the too-busy pattern of flowers and playing cards that he’d walked in on; a vibrant yellow shag rug had taken its place. The television was gone, replaced by what looked to be an old hi-fi unit, and the cream-colored metal box underneath the windows—what he guessed was probably either an air conditioner or a heating unit—was missing. An old-fashioned fan swept at the air in tireless circles above the bed.

And there it was; the major difference, the thing he’d been driven there to get. The painting was hanging on the wall next to the window, the frame the same old ugly mahogany piece of shit that Parker remembered seeing once on Michael’s living room wall. The painting itself showed none of the former colors; when he had seen it last, it had looked alive with colors, a thousand different shades all in splatters and strange shapes. Gina had tried to explain to him that it was like one of those inkblot tests, that you saw what you wanted in it, but he had always thought it just looked like someone tripped in a paint factory and knocked over every can in some kind of domino effect.

The painting had none of that sense of clutter now, but he knew it just the same. Now it was just a black piece of canvas, lacking that former vitality, but the black looked slick and oily, almost as if it was shifting ever so slightly. It made him think about the way oil slicks looked if you tried to watch them out of the corner of your eye and some fucked-up story he’d read back in college about this living puddle of slime that lived on a lake and ate some kids. He had a feeling he might know what those kids had felt if he actually tried to touch it.

He realized that hadn’t been the only addition to the room; the disgustingly purple chair was still there, but he realized something was sitting in it now. An indistinct figure was staring at him, gaining solidity the longer Parker stared at it. The body remained faded and impossible to get any detail on, but the face was becoming clear.

“Parker.” Woods’ voice was strained, pain leaking through it and infecting Parker’s mind. The empathic connection was making his whole body ache. “Your gig now, I guess.”

Parker could hear him clearly, though he supposed that wasn’t really an interesting bit of information to anyone. He supposed it would be odder if being half deaf affected your ability to listen to a ghost. He had no doubt that was exactly what he was talking to.

“In so many words, yeah. But come over here. Time’s short.” The thing sitting in the chair, the thing that had once been Damien Woods, was looking decidedly less well by the moment; the facial features that had come out of the swirling mist were starting to crack and split, and something that looked like blood was beginning to run from his nostrils and eyes. Blood didn’t usually turn black and start to burn into your flesh so far as Parker was aware though.

Parker took a step closer to Woods, scowling when Woods lifted one hand toward him. His voice still carried the note of sarcasm and know-it-all irritation over the pain, as he shook his head. “Look, would you quit the Red Riding Hood act and get your ass over here?”

The tone and words, more than anything else, convinced him that it was fairly safe; anything being that irritating when it was falling apart and already pretty much dead
had
to be Woods, so far as Parker was concerned. The worst of his doubts banished, Parker took the final step forward and grabbed for Woods’ hand.

Whatever he had expected—that his own hand would pass through Woods’ was on the top of the list, but he supposed there were always other possibilities—this wasn’t it. Touching Woods was like sticking his finger into an electrical socket. As the charge passed through him, seemingly conducted from his fingertip up his arm and through his torso, and then burrowed up his neck into his head, Parker fell back, shouting.

It felt like jellyfish were crawling around in his skull, sending barbed spikes into his brain and occasionally giving him a jolt for good measure. Parker went to his knees, still screaming.

“Oh, quit whining.” The voice was calm and collected, cutting through the mental static and shocking Parker into silence. It seemed to have come both from inside his head and the chair where Woods’ ghost had been sitting a moment ago. When he cocked an eye in that direction, Parker realized that he could no longer see anything of Woods in the shape there, and even the gauzy form that remained was rapidly fading.

“What the fuck?”

It’s
simple,
really.
This time, the sound came entirely from inside his head, but there was no mistaking the identity; it was Woods.
Yes,
it’s
me.
No
shit,
Sherlock.
No
wonder
they
never
made
you
captain.
Now
shut
up
and
hang
on.
I’ve
got
a
lot
to
show
you,
and
I
don’t
have
long
to
do
it.

“But you’re dead. Aren’t you?”

As
a
fucking
doornail.
Quit
asking
questions
and
just
watch.

Parker felt like someone had turned the inside of his head into a theater, one of those old ones that still had the velvet curtains to either side of the screen, the kind that played the movies on a screen around a hundred feet wide and seventy feet tall or so. The image persisted, and he imagined himself sitting next to Woods in that theater, watching the screen as the lights dimmed and the curtains rose.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat in that mental theater with Woods, while the whole mess played out in front him, starting in the way back with the artist who first conceived of it laying paint on canvas and birthing the
talu`shar
and driving through centuries of history and thousands of Wardens. It started moving into a time line that was closer to Parker’s heart, when Karim took control of the damned thing, even showing him the death of Mikey’s family. Parker had wanted to turn away from that, but Woods forced him to watch. In the mental theater, his imagination conjured Woods grabbing the sides of his head and forcing it to face the screen, but he knew that was just imagery put up by his subconscious—or some shit that the psychologists would say—to try to make this make some kind of sense to him.

He saw the slaughter, saw the way Karim enjoyed it, even saw how he jacked off over the memory later. Then it came to Damien’s death, and again, Parker tried to look away. Much as he hadn’t liked the man, nobody needed to die like that. Again, Woods wouldn’t let him, forcing him to see and to understand.