Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (3 page)

“Shhhh-sh-sh-sh,” she said, pulling her sister’s face to her chest
again.  “Nobody’s gonna hurt you.  Not anymore.  And the laughing man’s gone, you hear?  He’s gone and he’s not ever coming back.  Ya hear me, chil’?  He ain’t never comin’ back.”  It would be a little while later that Kaley realized she had sounded exactly like her Nan.  “What were you doing up in the first place?”

“I was itching again,” she said.  Shannon had an infection, something the doc
tors called vaginitis.  An inflammation of her private parts, with terrible itching and the occasional discharge.  Shannon was the victim of rape, and she wasn’t just dealing with the emotional stresses of it—as a matter of fact, she had buried much of that pain, likely thanks to the “charm” she and Kaley shared—she was also dealing with the infection her rapist had given her.

They had given her another sickness, too, one that removed her innocence, took away that playful youth, that sanguine outlook she’d long had on life.  They had amputated a part of her, opened up another door in her mind, one that let all the pain and hurt of the world flood in,
and left her in fear of what total strangers might do to her.  For Shannon, the world was no longer wide open and full of wonder, it was cold and deceitful and evil and crowded with terrors.  She wanted nothing more than to keep it out.  Hence, all the black curtains.

“I woke up itchin’ all over,
” Shannon said, “and saw you jumping and jerking in your sleep again.  I shook you, tried to wake you, but you told me to run.”

“I did?”

Shannon nodded meekly.  “You said, ‘Run away, Shan.  They gonna get you too.  Run!’  I stayed and kept shaking you, but then I felt the hands…or…or I felt the hands around
you
.”  This was due to the empathic connection of their charm.  Almost always, when either of them was under terrible stress, the other one detected it, just like they always seemed to detect the surface emotions and occasional thoughts of others, like a spider detecting movement in its web.  The web stretched out from them, and as far as Kaley could tell, the web had no limit.  But the closer someone was, the stronger she felt about it.

Or, in some cases, the more powerful the pain, the more it seemed to ripple through the web, along various avenues and arms, and finally resting inside her head and guts. 
Inside my everything
.

“I knew you was about to jump out again, that you would be safe enough for a second,” said Shannon.  By
jump out
, she meant exit her body.  Kaley didn’t like to think of it like this.  It made her feel like her soul was actually leaving her body, and that meant death.  And if she died while those things were pulling her down, down, down…

Shannon started weeping again. 
An alarm bleated obnoxiously somewhere in the apartment for a full two seconds before it stopped.  A light suddenly switched on down the hallway. 
Mom’s up
.  Jovita Dupré would be around and about in a moment, and then there would be inevitable arguments, possibly even shouting matches if Kaley elected to retort.

“
Hush now, we’re okay.  Hush it, I said,” she told her sister sweetly, quietly.  “Now come on, help your big sister clean up this mess,” she said, pointing to the wet spots she’d left on the floor, droplets of urine that made a trail all the way to her room.  “And let’s put those sheets in the washing machine.  Before Mom gets up and has a fit.”

The hunting lodge that his family once rented out twice a year to members of the Slaviansky Trophy Hunting Society was now empty.  The lodge was forty meters away from the main house, it was two stories and fully powered by gas year-round, with air-conditioning and water that was kept from freezing by its own independent gas tank and generator.  There was a snow-capped shed with a Subaru Forester parked inside, flanked by two ATVs, all with chains for their tires, and plenty of petrol cans and spare tires.

Zakhar kicked the snow off his boots on the doorstep,
pulled his right glove off with his teeth and fished in his pocket for the key—even after all these years of living alone in the middle of nowhere, he still locked it behind him whenever he left.  And why not?  He had other reasons for keeping people out, and not just poachers.

He glanced at the ice-covered thermometer hanging on the wall beside the door:
-2
0°
C
.

When he stepped inside, Zakhar closed the door behind him at once in order to preserve the precious warm air.  Then he paused, looked around, and listened.  The lodge
was dark and appeared exactly as it always had: quaint, old, well kept and with lots of character.  Two large bearskins were dangling from the rafters, a third one splayed on the wall, and a forth one, the largest one, growling angrily in front of the fireplace.  Over that fireplace was an oak mantelpiece, and above that hung a large rectangular mirror, which made the living room appear more spacious than it actually was.  A moose was mounted on the far wall and looked straight ahead dutifully, never eyeing him.  The place still smelled freshly of the pinewood it was made of.  A gun rack over the door was still full, nothing missing there.  The wicker couches and chairs still had their plush pillows and cushions, all soft and new from his latest additions.

After a few moments of checking the other doors and
giving the windows a jiggle, Zakhar decided the poachers hadn’t been this brave.  He unshouldered his Tigr-308 and replaced it in its own gun cabinet, which he also had a key for.  He kept the pistol strapped to his side, though.  When spending long holidays out here alone, he never went anywhere without it.  He even slept with the Colt Woodsman .22 on the nightstand, within arm’s reach.  Home invasion was highly unlikely out here, which was why he sold his property in the city years ago and moved back home. 
But there was a first time for everything
, he mused.

The rest of his family in Derbent had found that out the hard way.  They lived in the boring part of a boring town, and yet look what happened to them.  Some nobody, a drifter some said, had come out of nowhere and shown them how the outside world could intrude on such tranquility.

The lodge was warm, despite there being no fire in the fireplace.  He never liked to leave a fire going while he was away from the cabin, but he liked for it to be heated when he returned. 
Let’s turn that heat off, get a fire started
.  He made a brief stop in the kitchen to flip on the tiny radio, and turned it to the weather station so that he could start monitoring this storm.

The logs were outside, chopped during the spring when the Siberian territories were only slightly cold.  Zakhar poured some water into a kettle, put it on an eye of the stove and got it
going, then stepped outside.  The snow was coming down even harder, if that could be believed, so hard that he could no longer see the forests of Siberian Pine where he’d conducted his day’s hunt.  The cold ignored his gloves and penetrated his bones, and the wind forced those snowflakes into his face, like little needles of ice.

He gathered up the logs
covered in hoarfrost, counting out six good ones, then stepped back onto the front porch and paused at the front door.  The footprints he’d left coming back from the woods were already getting filled in, and he was struck by their shape.  Some of them looked wider, and a little longer than the others.  The wind must have had some effect on that, he figured.

Balancing the chopped logs between his chest and left arm, Zakhar used his right hand to open the door, and halfway through, he paused again.  He bent to drop the logs on the rug inside, then turned back to the footprints leading up to his doorstep.  Zakhar stood there for a moment,
examining, his breath coming out in great clouds, his eyes attempting to penetrate the white curtain that nature had covered the world in.  He looked east, towards the frozen lake and its single, dilapidated dock.  It was also mostly ensconced by the downpour.

When he stepped back inside, he shut the door and locked it.  He waited, listening to the house, the lonesome creaks and groans.  The wind
was pushing against the windows, causing them to make little snapping sounds.  He reached for the Colt at his side, checked it again to reassure himself, then he went about searching the house.

When Jovita stepped out of her bedroom, folding the front of her robe around her waist, she was already shivering. 
Cold as a witch’s titty
, she thought briefly, but her mind was already working on what she had to get done today.  She had to restock the house with some groceries—they were almost sittin’ on empty—and she had to talk with her sister Tabitha about that job down at the church she’d been talking about.  Jovita’s only concern was that it was another ambush, a trap set up to
look
like a job interview, but once she got there they would tell her that she needed to stay clean and go through regular drug tests in order to get her measly paycheck.  Tabitha had done this to her once before with another church, an arrangement that was more intervention than interview, and that had turned out…

“What’cha’ll doin’?”
Jovita asked, stopping short in the living room.  Her two girls were bent over on the floor beside the couch, working the carpet back and forth assiduously with a pair of towels.

Shannon looked up sharply, looking guilty and caught, and, as always, she looked to her Big Sister, her Eternal Protector, who said, “I got up
early to get somethin’ to drink, and I spilled it.”

“What’choo drinkin’
this early fo’?  I ain’t even made you any breakfast.  You tryin’ to take that away from me now, too?”  The words were out of her mouth before she could check them.  She hadn’t meant to say anything like it, but there it was, hanging in the air.  For months now she had become frustrated with their little conspiracy of two.  Late at night, they walked around in their room after the lights were out, whispering their secrets to one another.  Jovita had heard them, and often barged in on them a few times and demanded that they go to bed.  It gave her a degree of dark maternal pleasure to interfere with their secrets.

They were up to something, she just knew it.  They were still their little conspiracy of two,
just like they had been before all that evil had happened to them.  Jovita had tried in those first two months, she had really,
really
tried.  But the cravings had started, and it hadn’t helped that Jerome Denney, one of her old dealers, had moved out this way three years ago and had been calling her up, asking to catch up on old times.  Kaley already suspected, already
knew
. And Shannon, well…
She won’t even look at me
.

Shan had been through a lot, and Jovita felt for her, went to hug her repeatedly, cried with her and tried to tell her
everything was going to be all right.  But always Shannon would go limp in her arms, like she was dead.  When she was in her sister’s arms, though, some ember of life was kindled, and she would grip and hug, even laugh on occasion.

And now they hate me again
.  It was mostly Kaley’s doing. 
God damn her, she knows what was done to me
. 
She knows I suffered the same as them!
  When a mother’s daughter was raped, the mother felt violated herself.  Powerless and crippled by her shame, Jovita had retreated further and further into her soft, safe world with Jerome Denney.

Jovita hated herself for not being there for her girls when they had needed her
most.  Rather, some other lunatic had had some say in their rescuing. 
And here I was, laid up an’ high as a kite
.  And she knew that, come later tonight, she was likely to be in the same state.  The same demons as before were calling to her; with each passing year, their song grew more sonorous, and the events in Atlanta had put Jovita in a state where she was willing to listen even more.

No, uh-uh
, she told herself. 
No, you are
not
doing that again, Jovita Dupré!

But Jovita knew better.  She was strong right now, right in this instant, but eventually…

Presently, her girls weren’t answering her.  She jerked her head towards the hallway.  “Get in there an’ get dressed.  You both were late for the bus the last time, I ain’t explainin’ that again.  That Principal Manning already look at me like he know somethin’ ’bout me.  A secret he ain’t tellin’.  I ain’t got time fuh
his
ass today, so don’t you get him on
my
case again.”  She did another jerk with her head, and the two girls walked by her in silent procession.

As Kaley went by, though, her eyes raked across her mother, assessing her in a moment.  Jovita almost said something. 
Oh, you think
you
know somethin’ about me, too?
  But she swallowed the challenge before it could ignite a war.  After all, Kaley did know something about her, didn’t she?  She knew Jovita Dupré hadn’t changed much in the last five months.  New clothes, a new apartment, and a new school hadn’t had any real effect on her, or any of them for that matter.  Family and friends in their old neighborhood had heard about what happened, had donated food and clothing, and offered so many tears and support.  For a time, Jovita had believed she could change, and perhaps Kaley and Shannon had allowed themselves to believe it for a time, too.  But now…