The Fall of Never (51 page)

“Nellie!”

He tried to ease her down onto the bed but she refused to be moved. He tried again—yet this time he quickly recoiled, shocked and terrified by the sudden sensation of
collapse
inside him…as if two invisible hands had grabbed his heart and started to squeeze.

Nellie,
his mind stammered,
was that you? Reaching out for me?

Scared, he pushed back through the room, feeling the cuts on his feet now, feeling the freezing wind coming through the shattered window, and dashed into the hallway, through the small sitting room, into the kitchen. He’d pasted Carlos Mendes’s beeper number to the telephone. He grabbed the slip of paper now, his heart pumping so loudly he could hear it in his ears, and fumbled with the phone. He attempted to dial the numbers but he fingers were too big. After three failed attempts, he took a deep breath and dialed the number once more.

Paging Doctor Mendes,
he thought.
Doctor Mendes, you have a patient going into telekinetic fits in the next room. Please report to the emergency room STAT.

And what could Mendes do, anyway?

He waited for the prompt, then punched in Nellie’s number, hit the pound key. Three short beeps rang out over the line.

Jesus, hurry!

From behind him there came a sound like fingernails being dragged along a chalkboard. He turned and saw a hairline crack weaving along the windowpane above the sink. He watched it with numb detachment.

Is that you, Nellie? Is that you? What happened, what did you see? What did you see that’s making your mind tear down this apartment?

The window began rattling in its frame. Josh hung up the phone and began backing out of the kitchen, not taking his eyes from the window. He was mesmerized by it, powerless to look away. He could see his own reflection in the glass, facing him, also retreating, growing smaller…only the reflected Josh had been decapitated by the lengthening crack, his features a jumble of maundering jigsaw pieces.

Nellie—

The window burst from the pane, shooting spears of glass at him and the opposite wall. Bringing up his arms, elbows out, he felt the glass pelt him, felt a sudden stink followed by warm wetness on the side of his right hand. Beside him, he could hear the glass shattering against the kitchen wall. One piece struck a pot on the stove and was deflected with a distinct
cling!

Stumbling into the sitting room, Josh scrambled for the light switch but could not locate it. A sharp winter wind struck his back from the kitchen. He pushed around the sofa just as he heard that same fingers-on-a-chalkboard grind. Looking up, he could see the row of windows covered by curtains, lights from the city glowing behind the curtains’ sheer fabric. They looked like flesh…like spread batwings before a blinding light. And he could clearly make out the spider-web fissures progressing rigidly along the faces of the windowpanes.

They’re all going to implode,
he told himself.
They’re all going to smash open and pepper this place in glass.

And he was in the wrong goddamn spot.

To his left, the old phonograph snapped to life, the sounds of Duke Ellington starting off slow, distorted…then gathering momentum. It was like a nightmare fun-house. And what about Nellie? Was she dead? Dying? In all the commotion, it seemed like he’d run frantic out of her bedroom no less than an hour ago. But surely it hadn’t been more than a minute or two.

The sharp stink of citron stung his nose again, caused his nostrils to flare. And understanding what that meant just mere seconds before the row of windows imploded, Josh dropped to the carpet, his hands laced over the back of his head, and pushed himself up against the foot of the sofa. A second later and he felt the floor rattle, heard a solid crash, and was aware of blades of glass whizzing inches above his head. A blast of freezing air accosted him.

Someone has to hear all this. Surely a neighbor was shaken awake by the racket. Someone—anyone—has to help.

Around him: the sounds of glass striking the far wall and thudding to the carpet in pieces. Some blades drove themselves into the wall, where they stuck like arrows in a target. Some others struck framed photographs, sending them crashing to the floor as well. A crystal vase on the small coffee table was struck with an audible
ping!
but did not break.

A fading image of Kelly fell across his mind, and he forced himself back to his feet. For a moment, he was pinned with disillusionment before the row of glassless windows like a superhero atop a skyscraper—arms out, clothes billowing, hair blown back—before reality came crashing down on him. Back in the real world, he pushed passed the sofa, the phonograph moaning with Ellington’s orchestra, and back into Nellie’s bedroom.

For one insane moment, Josh saw Sampers—the kid who’d shot and nearly killed him over a year ago—standing beside Nellie’s bed, one hand over the old woman’s chest. He saw this with perfect lucidity—saw the kid standing beside the window in his crushed leather jacket, the curtains billowing out around his feet, his long, greasy hair hanging in front of his eyes. And he turned up to look at Josh too, his skin pockmarked and honeycombed with sores, his eyes lifeless except for the underlying accusatory light that throbbed beneath their surface.

How’ve you been, Cavey? You been doin’ good? You been doin’ real good? I haven’t.

And then Sampers was gone. He’d never really been there: it was just a trick of the light, shadows mixed with the undulation of the curtains. And Nellie’s mind, he thought. That made the most sense. Nellie’s mind, suddenly fired up and running in the red, had plucked that image of Sampers from his own head and had made him see it. She’d made Sampers real, if only for a second.

Real?

“Real enough,” he uttered, his voice shaking, and rushed to the old woman’s bedside.

Carlos Mendes, asleep on his beeper, was awoken by its vibration. Though he’d become accustomed to late-night pages from the hospital over the years, something deep inside him knew this wasn’t the hospital tonight. He needn’t check the number on the pager to know that.

He pulled himself out of bed, casting a glance at the huddled form of his wife, and slipped on a pair of jeans and an old Rangers sweatshirt. Downstairs, he gathered his medical bag and shuffled out into the cold. An absurd notion struck him then:
If we just change the baby’s name, Nellie’s prediction will not come true. It is as simple as that.

Could it be?

He took Marie’s car into the city, and was downtown just as it started to snow. It came down in a thick blanket almost immediately, then lessened to a mere flurry by the time he reached the West Side and Nellie Worthridge’s apartment complex. In the darkness, it loomed above him like an omen.

We’re like old friends now,
he thought, scaling the building with his eyes.

He parked in an alley and hustled up into the lobby, took the elevator to Nellie’s floor. There, he paused as he stepped from the elevator. The corridor was mostly dark, the row of ceiling lights crackling and flashing intermittently. And with each flash, shadows jumped, colors swam. For one crazy instant, he thought the walls had been spray-painted with words: words from his nightmares. He froze, his bowels involuntarily clenching. Peering through the darkness to the end of the hallway, he expected to see that bizarre, deviled caricature of Peter Pan—

(someone else)

—sketched across the far wall. But no—it was all in his head. He was being too jumpy.

He rushed to Nellie’s apartment, considered knocking, then decided to just let himself in.

He’s first impression was of Blatty’s
The Exorcist:
lights were blinking, the phonograph was slowly rotating through an old jazz record, and Jesus Christ the goddamn
windows
had been blown out. Papers and napkins and paper cups—anything the wind was capable of manipulating—bobbed along the floor or gathered in tiny whirlwinds. Directly in front of him, a brass-and-wood wall clock ticked loudly, its minute hand moving too fast. There was a definite fruity stink inside the room, hardly dissuaded by the fresh night air, and as Carlos took a few steps into the apartment, he could feel the hairs along the nape of his neck and his arms prickle and rise. It was static electricity, he thought; that pulsing undercurrent from Nellie’s mind.

He yelled out for Josh, who appeared around the hallway looking like a drowned mutt. He was breathing heavy, his hair in tousled ringlets, his eyes hidden in the deep pockets of his skull. As Josh approached him, Carlos saw that the kid’s hands were quaking, that his right hand was even bleeding. There was also blood wiped in a smeared arc across his white undershirt.

“Doc,” he muttered.

“What the hell’s happening here?”

“What’s the extent of…” Josh cleared his throat. He sounded confused and uncertain as to what he was trying to say. “Nellie’s doing it.”

“How in the
world—”

“With her
mind.”

“My God…”

“Is it bad, the rest of the building?” Josh’s voice shook. “I didn’t know if maybe it went beyond her apartment, maybe somewhere…I don’t know…maybe some other places…”

“Lights in the hallway are blinking,” Carlos said, his eyes running the length of the room. The jazz record ended and the needle began bumping. “That’s about it, as far as I can tell. Where is she? Is she all right?”

“Bedroom,” Josh said, and turned to lead Carlos down the hallway. “She doesn’t look well and she won’t say anything to me. I don’t know if she can or just won’t. I think she’s scared. Do you think she could have, you know, had another stroke?”

Carlos stepped over a fallen picture frame.
I’ve never seen a stroke victim blow out windows just by thinking about it,
he thought. “Just let me see her,” he said.

Nellie’s bedroom was in the same state of affairs. The single window here was gone as well, the curtains billowing out like ghosts. The chair Marie had once sat in was now overturned and strewn in a corner, one of its legs busted. As he approached the bed, Carlos sidestepped the larger slivers of glass scattered about the floor.

“Nellie.” He couldn’t bring his voice above a whisper; it simply would not comply. “Nellie…it’s Carlos. Doctor Mendes from the hospital.”

“I’ve seen it,” she breathed. Her words caused him to pause in midstride. Behind him, he could hear Josh sigh with either relief of surprise at the sound of the old woman’s voice.

“Seen it?” he questioned.

“She’s in trouble,” Nellie said. “Kelly.”

“What happened here, Nellie? The windows—the whole apartment. What happened to you? Do you understand what you—”

“Not important!” she half-cried, half-croaked. She sounded as if something had lodged itself inside her throat. Her tongue lolled around inside her mouth: an obstruction. “No time…”

“What is it?” Josh said from the doorway.

“We need to help her now,” said the old woman. “We don’t have time. I need to go in after her.”

Carlos shook his head. To Josh, he muttered, “She’s talking delirious.”

“No, I don’t think so. She’s talking about Kelly.”

“She can’t go anywhere.”

“She can,” Josh said. “In her mind.”

Carlos moved to Nellie’s bedside and pressed a hand to her forehead. “She’s burning up with fever.” He placed his satchel on the bed, unzipped it. “See if she has some plastic trash bags,” he said. “Big ones. And lots of tape, Josh. Get these windows taped up, at least the one in here, okay?”

Josh nodded and slipped back into the hallway.

Carlos shook some instruments onto Nellie’s bed. He had no idea what needed to be done. “Are you with me, Nellie? Stay with me, dear.”

“Not for long,” she said. There was an odd serenity to her voice now. Carlos expected her to start grinning at any minute.

“Don’t say that.”

“Can’t stay here. Kelly…” She repeated Kelly’s name over and over again, as if committing it to memory.

“Nel—”

The old woman’s eyes began to flutter, her mouth silently working over her tongue. A clear strip of spittle ran down the corners of her mouth to her earlobes. For a brief instant, Carlos thought the woman was suffering a seizure, and he was preparing to respond accordingly…but then the wave hit him, stronger than it had been with Marie. It was a warm, electrically-charged current that emanated from her body, passed right up through his own, and diffused throughout the room. In that moment, Carlos was keenly aware of every organ in his body—every cell, every molecule, every sensation. He could feel the rush of blood washing against the walls of his arteries, could see the granulated flints of light at the base of his eyeballs, even now with his lids closed. And he could
see
his lids,
see
the insides of them and see right through them…

In a state of near-catatonia, Carlos thought,
She’s opening up her mind completely now, searching for this girl Kelly, and opening all her senses. It’s like a wave, a current…but an emotion too, in a way. I can feel it—some of it is actually washing over me, washing through me—and I can almost see what she sees too, I think, and feel what she feels. Almost. It is like being in a wind tunnel, or perhaps being the copper in a network of electrical wires. There is an intensity here, a power here, that goes beyond anything I am capable of describing. Of comprehending, too.