Thalo Blue (2 page)

Why had he even drawn the door shut earlier? He never closed that door, not since dad. But if he hadn’t, the stranger, when he had burst from the back bedroom into the hall, would have surely seen the light from Sebastion’s bedside lamp as he passed, would have even seen Sebastion himself sitting in bed, clutching the sheets. It moved—that door.
It actually moved
. He was that close to me. Just on the other side of that damn door. But why tonight? Why had it been drawn shut tonight? And why, goddammit, hadn’t he closed it tightly, all the way? Reaching up for the telephone, in view of the doorway, in view of the all-knowing, all-seeing stranger, that would have been easy right now if the door had been shut all the way. The numbers would already be dialed, quick as that, there’s only three to remember. And the police would be on their way. But now, now it felt too exposed to reach up there, like whoever was breaking things in the living room could actually be standing at the doorway, peering in. The intruder would see that hand reaching up for the receiver. There was no logic in that—how could the stranger see him—but the realness of it, the actuality, seemed undeniable.
Why don’t I just go and close the door?

No. Too much time. It would take too much time to get up, cross the room, close the door, and return to the phone. It was the phone, he just needed to focus on that and nothing else. He needed to get up on his knees, whirl around quietly and dial those three numbers. He simply had to.

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He steadied his head. It was still buzzing a little, even since the TV had been silenced, even since the room had been darkened by its abrupt absence. But his hand was shaking—little droplets of blood from his wound were dripping onto the couch and growing like an ugly flower. The shaking would get worse. Just like the sounds would get worse, the light would get brighter and the pain would seer and burn. These wounds were going to be his undoing. And so would the sounds in his head.

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Sebastion realized that, not only had his breathing been sporadic at best, but his hands had become cold, dead cold. And they were both beginning to shake. He tried to steady them, rubbing them together. They sounded rough and dry, not prepared to do even the simple task he was about to ask of them.

But he summoned the strength of will, maybe the audacity, to finally spring upwards. He scraped a little against the wall, steadied his weight, then turned around to face the nightstand. He snatched up the telephone receiver, hit those three numbers in quick succession, and came back around, settling down on his lower spine on the carpet. Again he was nestled on a peculiar angle between the bed and the cool drywall.

There. That wasn’t so bad. That was okay. The tremors were running through his cold hands and he had to use both of them to hold the tan reciever to his ear. It rang once, on the other side. Sebastion heard it faintly, from a distance so unbelievably far away. At that moment, how could anyone so far away hear him? He held his breath. And the receiver gave an audible click.

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

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Moments passed. There was more light in the living room. It was still dim, but when he opened his dark, glassy eyes he could see outlines of furniture and picture frames on the walls. He sat back against the plush sofa cushions and held the derringer against his face. Its grip was wet with sweat and blood. Since the television had exploded he had been rubbing his hands together, had been pushing the heels of them into his eyes and across his moistened forehead, as if doing so would silence or even lessen the volume inside his skull. They were intensifying again, those sounds. Despite the new quiet, that buzzing inside this mind was growing. It was getting louder still.

And with that, he turned an ear toward the sheer curtain behind him. Out there, in the street, he heard the sirens again. More of them this time. The rising of their shrillness came again, like waves bringing the oil-slicked tide to a dry shoreline. His eyes narrowed. And his grip on the derringer tightened.

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“—No. Y—You don’t understand—” Sebastion’s whispers into the handset didn’t sound like his own. They were those of a stranger he had never met. Perhaps those of the same stranger in his house at this moment. The stranger was here—somewhere—and he didn’t know where exactly. He could be there at the threshold of this room, could be looking in at the crumpled sheets of the bed with Sebastion crowded into the narrow strip behind it. Sebastion didn’t know, hadn’t heard any more movement, hadn’t heard a sound at all in several minutes.

“—he’s in the house.
Somewhere
. I don’t
know
where. Jesus Christ. He broke the window in the back...and now he’s inside—” The operator was calm, almost too calm, Sebastion thought. It was as if she couldn’t understand how Sebastion knew the intruder was there if he couldn’t see him. It was like the whole world was against him, simplicity made into the marching enemy, idiots waving the flag with their brains removed, their eyes sewn shut, and their tongues pickled in a jar somewhere. All of them, every last man, woman and child, unable to understand bare bones explanations, even if Sebastion screamed it into their ears or enlightened them with color diagrams and scale models.

“—He just is. Please—goddammit.
Please
.” And with that, Sebastion added the detail he had not dared to think. The one forcefully pushed out of his head since this whole nightmare had started: “He might be armed.”

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The sirens grew. Sebastion, in his cubby-spot, heard them too, became red in the face with the renewed hope they brought. And here, this intruder, this
stranger
, heard them rise. Perhaps this was at an end. They were close and he had nothing, no way out this time. But they didn’t know he was here, didn’t know he was sitting on this sofa, in this room, in this house. They didn’t know that because there was no way they could have. The other homes on this street were too far off to have heard that window break, too far off and too hidden by thick stands of trees, to have seen him in the yard trying the handle on the back door then climbing up on that box of firewood. No one would have called anyone. And besides, this house was empty.

He had stood on the bricks of the flower enclosure in front of the only window with a light, pressed his fingers against the sill, and peeked through the dim glass and beyond it. Nothing. No one. Not a figure to behold.

This house
was
empty.

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Sebastion’s father hated cordless telephones. He had insisted, on several occasions, that there would never be a cordless telephone in his home as long as he was alive. They just weren’t technologically-advanced enough yet to compete with the clarity of a corded phone. In fact, Oliver Redfield was so adamant about his beliefs in the quality of a phone connection that every single phone in the Redfield residence was identical. The one on the wall in the kitchen, the one in the basement, the one in the office at the back of the house, and this one, the bedside set which his son, Sebastion Redfield, lay clutching to his ear with sweaty hands. They were each the exact same model: a tan desktop three-line business unit, square base with rounded corners and gray buttons, something you’d find on any desk in any cubicle of any office tower downtown. The redial function, the mute, the flash, all the buttons were in the exact same spot on each telephone so Mr. Redfield never needed to hunt for a function when he needed it. A whirlwind on the telephone, his conversations were a brunt force that swept through and silenced those on the other end. He would spit his instructions into the receiver, snap
bye
at whoever it was, then hit a line button to spit at someone else. Oliver’s mind was one of precision and single-purpose and be damned if he would waste time looking for a button if he didn’t have to.

The tan cord on the master bedroom’s telephone, spiraled plastic and wire, ran from the nightstand down to Sebastion. It carried to him the voice of a distant woman,
a savior
, he thought, one that could solve this whole mess and carry him away from it on her back. But now, there was a pause coming from the imaginary other side of the conversation. The idiots, the whole world village of them, were in a meeting. Leave a message. Wait your turn. Make an appointment. Come back later. The emergency operator had fallen silent for a speck of time and Sebastion could again hear the pounding of his heart in his ears. It was a loud drumming, out of time, and he tried to silence it. Or ignore it. But he could do neither. He lay there on his peculiar slant, one shoulder against the cold wall, the other pressed into the carpet, listening intently for the operator’s voice to come back. He pressed the handset harder and harder against his reddened ear, straining to hear anything from it. He concentrated, willed her to begin saying something, anything, and in the interim, he started to imagine things. Everything he saw, he realized, was awash in a yellow tint, everything: the walls, the bedsheets, the carpet. He shook his head a little, knowing what it meant, but not wanting to. It led him to imagine—after the operator had typed details on her keyboard and after an address had been given by a dispatcher to a police cruiser already en route down Yonge—that there were gentle footsteps settling into the hallway rug, coming closer to his set-ajar door. That mental image blurred beneath a yellow wash too and just as he convinced himself that these phantom steps were actually counterfeit, they stopped just outside the bedroom door. A creak in the floor, one that he knew since childhood, made them real. The footsteps in the soft carpet, just like the ones in the crunchy snow outside his window, were not a product of a fevered mind.

The hinges of his bedroom door gave a drawn-out squeak and Sebastion’s breath hitched like a prickly bur in his throat.

The operator’s voice came back all at once with a million words of nonsense that he couldn’t understand, couldn’t hear, didn’t want to be spoken aloud.
He’s coming. Oh by God, he’s coming into my room
, he wanted to scream at her. He hated her now, she was not his savior, she was the enemy too, she with her loud voice creeping into the space around the bed. Her words were loud whispers, volume rising as they traversed the brisk air in the room and cascaded like caterpillars on the molecules of space all the way to that stranger’s ears. She
wanted
the stranger to hear her, Sebastion knew it at that moment, knew that she would never keep quiet. Here now, just a moment after he had silently begged her to be there and save him with her voice, he wanted her gone, wanted her silenced.
He’s coming and he can hear your voice. Shut up! Shut the hell up!
But he didn’t say anything to her. Couldn’t. And she kept talking, oh she kept talking. It was reassuring trivial talk mostly, empty, just her hating him so much that she wanted his hiding spot uncovered. Oh she hated him! More questions came from her, traveled the air, ah this woman who was working
with
the stranger to flush him out:
Where is he now?
the hating voice asked.
Can you hear him?
the disembodied co-conspirator wanted to know.
Has he left?
the operator said in his ear, secret code words that would take flight and seek out strange eardrums.

Sebastion was silent, betrayed. His gangly metal limbs were locked still. All he could do was lay there, his eyes twitching at the strange canted view: the edge of his bed where twisted sheets strew down on him. And beyond it? The ceiling where a slight round glow from the bedside lamp lay, for the moment unhindered. That was nonsense. That this stranger could hear the operator’s code words, her near-silent muffle of tones from the receiver, pure nonsense. The figure would not see him here either, would not know that he lay hidden in this spot. Oh but would surely see the slight quiver in the telephone cord running from the tan base where the gray buttons were, down from the nightstand to the handset, pressed hard against his ear. The stranger would see that cord and know that someone lay at the other end of it.

The lamp’s glow was broken. It came from the edge of the rounded light-shape, whatever it was, and it moved across, as if in slow motion. The wash of piss-vibrant yellow intensified and he was positive he would pass out. Then everything sped up. The color blared loudly. A figure, impossibly large, fell across his vision, blurry with movement. With both hands the figure reached down to the space between bed and wall. It grabbed Sebastion by his neck and hauled him to his feet. Sebastion’s first thought was a panicked cry,
Do I know this face? All grown up but the same—have I seen this face before?

The wash turned from yellow to a concentrated orange, one that screamed inside his head. He screamed too, at least he tried to. It came out of the base of his throat more like a stifled call in a windstorm with gravel and dust kicking at the words. It was the staggered, helpless plea of a man who did not know what was going to happen to him, and it ended in a gagging, choking sound as pressure from the stranger’s hands intensified. Thoughts were lost. The face looked vacant. It looked like nothing—
like no one
—he had ever seen before. The handset fell from Sebastion’s twisted fingers, clacked against the wall under the curtains, and trembled on the carpet with a muffled voice still coming from inside. He stood now, fully gripped by this unnaturally large-seeming man, and he looked into those eyes, the dark, brilliant eyes of a stranger.

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Part of Emergency Operator Forty-One’s training was to remain calm—excruciatingly benign, if necessary. Cold and detached, if called for. In fact, that was the biggest lesson her training ever taught her and she remembered it like an animal instinct, drawing from it for each and every duty call she received. Remaining calm was like a chemical sedative. Experiencing it induced calm in the person at the other end of the line—she knew that well. Though the caller could inevitably be experiencing the most terrifying moment of his life, she knew that the human brain could be trained easily and quickly, taking her offered sedative as if she had dissolved it in a glass of water. A troubled mind can stand apart from the horrors where it dwells. It can be productive—even in shock, even in the direst times.