Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams (43 page)

“Yes?”

“I can’t see
properly.”

West stood
still for a moment, Charlene coming to a halt a few steps behind
him, thankful for the brief respite.

“Open your
eyes.”

Stephanie
blinked apprehensively, utterly bewildered by the shifting myriad
of colors and shapes.

“Well,
Stephanie … I can honestly say that’s something I’ve never seen
before.”

Charlene rested
a hand on his shoulder and looked down at Stephanie’s face, gasping
as she looked into the child’s eyes.

“What? What’s
wrong?”

West hugged her
a little closer to his chest, “Nothing is wrong, don’t panic. It’s
just that, for some reason, the leeches have decided that right now
you would benefit from having compound lens irises.”

Stephanie
kicked the term around in her mind, trying to find an image to
connect it with. She knew she had heard it before.

“Like a
fly?”

“Yup.”

She smiled and
stuck her tongue out, opening her eyes wider.

“I can’t see
though.”

Her smile
melted all of the tension in Charlene’s body, so palpable was her
relief that Stephanie wasn’t going to fold under the stress of this
new experience. She found it hard to look away from such an
unworldly sight. There were still the whites of her eyes, not
bloodshot, but rather more pearlescent than they should be, then,
raised fractionally more from the eye’s orb than a normal iris and
bearing no pupil, Stephanie’s lenses flickered a thousand shades of
green and blue.

West started to
move again, “Keep looking Stephanie. It may take your brain a
little while to adjust. If it’s too much for you though, I would
imagine that if you close your eyes and concentrate on seeing
normally again, the leeches will put you right. It’s just a guess
though. I can’t tell you how to take control of the leeches; they
think they know what’s best for you and they’re usually right.”

Stephanie kept
her eyes wide open, imagining that she was staring up at the place
where West’s face would be, “I want to see. I mean, I want to see
what it’s like.”

As Charlene rummaged
through the bag she’d salvaged from the car wreck and passed her
another handful of teriyaki jerky, Stephanie closed her left eye
and concentrated on trying to interpret the information she
received from her right eye. There was too much to see, so many
separate fields of vision. She was aware of movement, thousands of
facets of light swirling and twitching in an ocean of darkness.
There were moments, fractions of moments when she thought she could
make out a canopy of leaves, but then the leaves would dissolve
into a whirling torrential sky of dazzlingly bright stars. She
closed her right eye, then opening her left she looked from side to
side. A cluster of bright moving shapes started to resolve and her
concentration became so focused that her breathing slowed almost to
a standstill. She could see West’s face, but not as she’d ever seen
it, not as she’d seen anything in her life.

From her
perspective, the curve of his chin and lips presented a lavish
landscape of detail, each pore visible as a crevice, each wrinkle a
deeply etched ravine. She could see the distance from the tip of
every stubbly hair to the concave pit in which it was embedded, yet
at the same time, she was able to see her own eyelashes and the
tiny flecks of dust which alighted on them. More than that, there
was a depth to the air; colors flowing from West’s mouth and
nostrils as he breathed, eddies and whirls of blues and reds
describing the contoured movements of the air currents. When she
again opened her right eye, it took all of her reserves of
concentration, but she found gradually that she was able to align
the overlapping images presented by the two independent groups of
lenses. The resulting image was such a complex and rich vista that
she was emotionally shaken. She wondered, with all of the bitter
sweet melancholy that her seven years allowed her, why she had
never seen the world in all its beauty.

Oblivious to
Stephanie’s epiphany, West and Charlene reached the edge of the
wooded area and stood together looking out at the quiet, small-town
subdivision in front of them. The sirens were still within earshot,
but there was no sign of immanent danger, so West took the lead,
and they ran.

Cobb sat alone in the
Pontiac. He watched Stanwick leaning her head into the passenger
window of the Chevelle. He contemplated making a brake for one of
the stores down the road, imagining that he could ask to use a
phone, but he kept coming to the same question; who would he call?
It wasn’t obvious that he could trust Stanwick, or any of the
others, but they had trusted him enough to bring him along, which
had to stand for something. He had trusted his colleagues. He had
trusted the members of the New York Field Office, but his trust had
been misplaced. No, making a call, trying to run; those weren’t
real options, not at least until he really understood these
people.

He looked at
the clock. Three fifteen. Stanwick had asked him to stay in the car
because she was going to try and calm David’s fears. She didn’t
need to explain, it was understandable that David would be feeling
pretty frenetic, waiting for his daughter’s return. On the drive to
Mechanicsburg, he’d tried to ask Stanwick about what had happened
in the gas station. He’d been a mess, but he had still been with it
enough to know what he’d seen. Stephanie was feral, crazed and
she’d taken down a grown man with brutal ease. He glanced again at
the store, and checked off another sound reason for not making a
run for it.

Cobb closed his
eyes and let his memories drift and tumble. He had never been naive
about the work he performed with the Bureau. The public perception
was that there were gray areas, and activities that crossed lines.
He’d listened with gritted teeth over the years as the press talked
about the stripping of civil liberties and unconstitutional
behavior. It had always been his understanding that it was not part
of his job to cross lines. It was his job to ensure that the lines
were real, perceived, and adhered to by those who stood on the
wrong side of those lines. Where were the lines now? Had anyone on
his team been on the straight?

He opened his
eyes and saw that Stanwick was walking back towards the car. ‘Know
yourself and not your enemies, you win some, you lose some,’ he
thought, then he looked down at the swim shorts he was still
wearing and he wondered what Sun Tzu would have to say about this
situation.

“What have you
got to smile about?”

Stanwick’s
voice was cutting, but her eyes told a softer story.

“Have you read
Sun Tzu?”

“No, but I did
read the first one, which is supposedly a much more upbeat
affair.”

Cobb laughed,
“The Art Of War …”

Stanwick raised
her eyebrows and patted his arm condescendingly.

“I was just
wondering how he finished the equation, ‘know not your enemy or
yourself’.”

Stanwick
smirked, “It translates roughly to the modern vernacular as,
‘you’re screwed.’ I paraphrase of course, but he would have
approved of the translation.”

Cobb’s hands
fretted over the hem of his borrowed shorts, attempting to provide
better coverage for his legs. He’d been on the losing side in the
apartment, but he’d survived, then the girl had saved him at the
gas station. He wondered, did that mean by default that he knew
himself better than he realized? Who was he to question the wisdom
of the ancients?

“How is David
holding up?”

Stanwick
shrugged, “He’s panicky. He needn’t worry. West is late, but he’s
not that late.”

She watched
Cobb’s eyes as he glanced at the clock and she was pleased to note
that he seemed concerned.

“You know Brad,
the time could be put to better use.” Her right hand went to his
left knee, stroking playfully. Cobb coughed and shuffled awkwardly,
nowhere for him to go. Stanwick smiled as she moved her fingers
under the loose fitting synthetic material.

“Knock it off!”
Cobb’s voice came as a high pitched plea, his cheeks reddening
immediately. He tried again, talking in a gruff and commanding
voice “I mean, knock it off.” .

Stanwick sighed
and pushed her head back against the car seat, pulling her hand
away as she reached into the back seat for the food.

“You’re no use
to me anyway,” she muttered bitterly, “I’d just break you.”

Cobb had never
been broken. He looked out of the passenger side window in a failed
attempt at stopping the flow of images that rushed through his
mind. He wanted someone to break him.

“I can see them all
around us, people walking and running, then they disappear.”

“There’s only
us here,” West assured her again, “but I have no way of guessing
what you’re seeing Stephanie, I’ve never known this happen to any
other Leechborn.” Stephanie walked between Charlene and West,
holding onto their hands and swinging their arms as she went.

“Do you think
it could be ghosts?” Stephanie asked, curious rather than scared.
As soon as West had set her down to walk, she had started to see
them and thought nothing of it at first, assuming the neighborhood
was simply bustling with activity. When a girl had ran out into the
street in front of her and then vanished, Stephanie was more taken
aback by the fact that neither West or Charlene seemed to
notice.

West laughed,
“I don’t believe in ghosts, but who knows? You’re sure it’s not
just the shape of those swirls of air you were talking about?”

“No!” she
replied defiantly, “They’re different. It’s definitely people. I
can see them walking around, then they disappear.”
Charlene squeezed her hand, “Are you scared of ghosts?”

“I don’t know.
Are they scary?”

Charlene looked
towards the end of the street they were crossing, the sound of a
car engine drawing her attention to a police patrol heading away
from them, “I don’t believe in them either Stephanie, but you’re a
good girl; I would think even if that is what you’re seeing, you’ve
got nothing to be scared of.”

Stephanie waved
Charlene’s arm harder in acknowledgment of her words of
comfort.

West led them
towards a long curving country road which wound out of the
neighborhood they were passing through. He quickly found a break in
the hedges and pushed through so that the three of them could walk
in the fields while still allowing them to follow the course of the
road into Mechanicsburg. Stephanie pulled hard on West and
Charlene’s hands, swinging herself forward, then suddenly she
yelled, “Stop!” and as she did, she dropped her weight and planted
her feet firmly in the soil.

“What? What is
it?” West asked, worrying that perhaps Stephanie had noticed
something that he’d missed.

Stephanie
squinted, trying to sift through all of the information that her
eyes conveyed to her brain. She could see the pollen, spinning and
drifting on the warm breeze, the shifting beams of light which
formed many colored curtains in the air and … yes, there in front
of them, she imagined that she could see three figures walking off
ahead of them. It wasn’t imagined though, she knew it wasn’t. She
watched the middle of the three figures swinging between the other
two, watched the vortexes and rivulets of air affected by the small
figure’s movements. Moments ago, she had decided to start walking,
then she had made a conscious decision to change her mind. The
moment she had stopped, the three figures had walked off ahead, the
little girl marching her ridiculous strident steps. Her ghost. Or
perhaps she was that Stephanie’s ghost. She felt oddly melancholic
as she watched the shimmering apparition skipping and hopping
towards a different future.

“I’m scared
West.”

West bent over
slightly and held her shoulders, “What are you scared of?”

“It’s us …
everywhere.That’s what I’m seeing. It’s just us.”

West frowned,
not sure that he understood what she meant by this, but still more
concerned that he understood only too well.

“What do you
mean?”

Everywhere she
looked, she saw West and Charlene, fighting, running, walking hand
in hand, sobbing, hugging. Sometimes, she could see herself with
them and yet if she tilted her head at a different angle, she could
see only West and Charlene. Gasping, she covered her eyes, “I think
I might have died.”

West hugged her
gently, “You’re fine Stephanie, I can assure you, you’re alive and
well.”

She opened her
eyes and saw the lone, ghostly images of West and Charlene walking
away in the milky translucent fog of images, “No, the other me … I
can see you and Charlene walking along without me.”

West patted the
back of her head softly, “Stephanie, that’s just the nature of
reality. At any given moment, any one of us could be taken. Life is
precious. The fact that you exist at all is the result of an
overwhelming run of luck. Besides, perhaps the other you just
didn’t get in the car with us in the first place.”

Stephanie
pressed her face against West’s neck and tried to block out the
thought of a world without her in it. It was a struggle for her
young mind because now she had witnessed such a world, she knew it
was all around her.

Allan Tiernan waved
the television into silence. He’d seen as much as he could bring
himself to watch. Once the car had left the interstate, he knew
there was little likelihood that the Pennsylvania Police Department
would locate West. It had to be West who was involved in the
pursuit. The others in the car were of little significance to him;
if they lived or died, it would have no bearing on coming events.
He had watched some of the news coverage of the scene at the gas
station and there had been a lot of talk about the fact that the
man who had been found in apparently critical condition, now
appeared to be in full health, but the reports were inconclusive,
anchormen clutching at straws. The couple of networks which were
still running with the story were playing the same footage over and
over again, and most of the networks had gone back to discussing
the nation’s most important story, the burning topic; Tiernan’s
return to office.