Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller (33 page)

Upon reflection of his early successes, Brikker had mused that, perhaps, the lucky ones had risen from that black abyss retarded; perhaps their God had spared them a greater indignity. He had once described the Sense as a dream that was real (a description he considered quite clever, if not entirely accurate), and while it was one thing to endure the physical trial of time travel, it was quite another to deny the dark insanity of what a post-Turn mind could scream. He had seen the mind come apart, shred from the inside by a fine blade.

Perhaps he was seeing this now.

He studied the man in the chair. Pathetic. Weak. If only he knew enough to embrace his gift, than to choose to spiral into hell.

“I don’t mean the lights,” the man said. “I’m talkin’ about the
world
goin’ black.”

“Shtop it,” the woman croaked. “Jush …
SHTOP IT.
”

“Black,” he said, as if repeating it would make her believe. She shut her eyes in tears, and for the next ten minutes, often repeating his words as if to certain himself, he relived the horrors of the Turn. At last he stopped, mesmerized by the glow of the cigarette, drawn by a man he could not see.

“You believe me, don’t you? That’s why you’re lookin’ for this guy, right?”

No reply.

“He’s not human,” the man said, speaking directly to the cigarette. “He—”

The woman pleaded with him to stop, the words rushing out with a slick whistle between her missing teeth.

“Don’t hurt her … please.
Please.
”

Only Brikker’s breathing broke that mindless tick … tick … tick. He would grant this pathetic gallantry.

The man settled, clearly relieved. “You’re with them,” he said, swallowing, emphasizing the last word like a preacher who has pointed out the demon among us. “The Government.” And then: “He’s one of them aliens you keep tellin’ us don’t exist.”

Brikker drew long on the cigarette. He exhaled, the filth from his lungs drifting into the light like poisonous ghosts.

“And you believe this?”

The man’s eyes scattered for the source of the question. The vile root of that thick and elusive voice.

“I know what I saw.” He regarded the lopped appendages at his feet. “I know what I know.”

Brikker stepped from the shadows. Hard light struck that stark side of his face, revealing cold white skin disfigured with pockmarks; the cut of that sinister black patch where his eye used to be. He placed a bloodied hand on the man’s wrist, and then he leaned in close. His breath was horribly pungent, like rotted cabbage.

“So … what should we do with this … alien.”

“You should kill him.”

Brikker straightened and loomed over the chair. He had cause to grin and he did. “In time … in time.”

“I don’t know where he is. I don’t.”

“Tell me,” Brikker said, pondering that which he firmly believed was the key to fully exploiting the potent Sense he possessed. The key that would take him to heights even Richards dared not dream. “What do you remember about the blackness?”

No reply. But then, he had not expected one. To dance with insanity could prove fatal to the faint of heart and weak of mind. And yet, given the man’s sober reaction—the eyes never lie—the dance had already begun.

He remembers,
Brikker thought, a burning urgency rising within him.
How it was to be ripped apart, atom by atom. The indignity of being stripped of flesh, raped of bone and blood. How it was to slip between the now and what was, only to be spewed forth as afterbirth from the cold womb of time. He remembers. The endless eons of mind; the dark and the death. He has the gift. Not as gifted as I, certainly, surely not as gifted as Richards … but gifted nonetheless. He will prove most useful.

That urgency pitched to a fever.

Could this one have touched it?

The physician struck another cigarette. He drew it quickly and deeply, then drew it from his lips as he approached the woman. He held it to her left eye, and she began to squirm fruitlessly like a snared animal. Her body seemed a skeleton on the verge of its fragile bones coming apart.

“I wish to know,” Brikker said.

The man pleaded with his eyes.
Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t make me talk about this.

Brikker did not ask twice. With three fingers of his right hand, he spread the woman’s eye and held it wide. She screamed at him, at nothing and at anything, summoning strength from somewhere inside that spent shell. Wasn’t the mind an incredible thing, he mused, the way it could, between one instant and the next, go from utter capitulation to utter fight.

He burned her. There was a sharp searing sound, far below the real screams now, and a rather sweet smell of burning that was always curious if nothing else. If need be, he would rip the other from its socket with his fingers.

Brikker darted behind the chair and snared the man by the throat. He clenched hard with his claws, choking him.

“Don’t you dare look away.”

The man was blubbering now, tears streaming down his face.

Brikker withdrew to the camera, admiring his handiwork. The screaming would go on and on now, an annoyance he had learned to live with as part of the job, and so he worked efficiently, almost effortlessly, loading film as required, clicking the shutter several times during this bothersome but still useful downtime, catching unique moments of suffering he would later develop and reflect upon, all the while savoring the very cigarette that had provided this opportunity. He waited patiently for the coming silence, and then it came, just like that, storm to calm in an instant, as if the woman’s mind had suddenly snapped from the agony. It was always the same. Her left eye rolled but once and slipped shut, and her right, now horribly misshapen, stood wild and wide as her eyelid flittered uselessly above the charred mass below it. It was a filmy, sunken thing staring blindly into the light; oddly, it seemed trained on the man in the wheelchair, as if laying blame. The Doctor made a final image, and then, moving swiftly to her, gave a slight touch to her throat … and nodded to the tender rhythm of her heart. Amazingly strong, this one.

He stepped slowly toward the wheelchair, each step echoing sharply, like stones upon glass. He kept to the shadows and watched the man sob. Waited for the whimpering to run its course.

“The darkness.”

“
Please … please no. God. No more.
”

“It is a fine line between fear and defiance,” Brikker told him. “I trust you know which edge of the razor you’re holding.”

Brikker moved to the console and pressed a yellow button. Somewhere in this cavernous place there was a small electrical sound of a cathode ray tube springing to life, ensued by a muted hum. The black-and-white monitor, suspended just left of the projected image, flickered at first, offering little more than dizzying patches of snow. Only when Brikker pressed another button did the screen settle to a useable image. It remained quite grainy, as if the signal had come from very far off, its clarity degraded by distance and weather. A live feed.

Ronald Jacobsen could only choke on his horror; could only tremble at the sight of his three children, gagged and bound on their living room sofa. Terror filled their tiny faces. They sat silently, perfectly still, the way children do when they have misbehaved or are truly frightened. Betty Jacobsen sat in his favorite chair, the one his father would sit in at Christmastime, the chair where the old man would tell stories of ghosts to his grandchildren. Her eyes were big balls of fright, staring impossibly at her husband. As if she could see him.

“No harm has come to them,” Brikker said. “That is up to you now.”

He could almost hear the man’s heart break. If only he could record
that.

“Do you know where the man in the photograph is?”

No.

“After the magic … did he head north? South?”

North.

“Did he say where?”

Minnesota.

“Did you see the mist?”

No. Just that redhead. Maybe some others.

“What did you see in the darkness?”

Ronald Jacobsen said nothing … and then shrank from the monitor for the first time since it had come on. He looked deathly ill. He held the sullen expression of someone who has finally accepted that Armageddon was at hand, that the world
was
coming to an end. The question had not only terrified him, it had struck a deep and powerful chord within him. His life had taken a far darker turn on that rainy October night than most could have dared imagine; he had experienced something that could only be described as living inside a mind. A black place filled with terrors and truths that could not be denied, no matter how many drinks, how many pills, you took, no matter how many times you stuck the barrel of your trusty Winchester into your mouth and just couldn’t pull that trigger. No matter how many times you woke up in a silent scream soaked in sweat, no matter how many times you lied to yourself that it just wasn’t so, it couldn’t possibly be. That it
was
just a bad dream. Or maybe God doling out some hell your way, you know, for spending one too many lonely nights on the road and cheating on your wife that one stupid, stupid time. The loving wife you saw tied up in your favorite chair—in your lying, lying, mind—over and over and over, months before you saw it on some grainy television screen in some dank, black hell-pit. It just … couldn’t … be.

Ah, but it can,
Brikker thought, piercing the man’s heart, draining its darkest secret.
You have touched the darker side of the Turn … you have touched the Coming.

He would waste no more time with the woman. He would rip every tooth and every nail from her for her defiance, and then he would kill her. Had she slept with Richards? No. He was certain of that now. True, there could be others; in time he would discover them. But that was a worry for the future. In this time, this
now,
he felt his confidence rising, new life for the chase. He had been so painfully close in Florida. He had had Richards in his grasp and had let him slip through his fingers. But not again. Not this time.

North,
he pondered.
Minnesota.

No doubt this wretch from Missouri harbored a boundless treasure of information; the man’s Sense was most impressive. He had tapped a bulging vein here. And now he would sink his fangs into it, suck it dry like a vampire.

The Doctor stepped into the smoky light. Leaned indecently close to the man in the chair. The man who would soon watch his precious wife be beaten and raped and his children shot, once the questions had been served, every avenue explored and splayed open.

Only then would Brikker cut out his brain.

“Now tell me,” he whispered, as cold as death. “What … did you see.”

~ 4

The world was still turning. The great Midwest heat wave was in its third grueling month with no signs of abating, but in a universe removed, politicians were still wrangling with the Port of New York Authority over construction of a pair of twin towers that promised to be the grandest, tallest structures in the world, symbols of unchallenged American supremacy; Jackie Robinson was inducted into baseball’s hall, and the Yankees were halfway to a showdown with the Giants; the American military presence in Vietnam had surpassed the population of a small town, and in Fort Worth, Texas, a horrific plane crash had claimed thirty-nine souls. Among the victims was a family of three, the father a troubled young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

But right now, here, just outside of Spencer, Iowa, it was Sunday morning, the last day of June. It had been a week since the monster home run, and Kain had seen neither hide nor hair of Ryan Bishop. He had managed to hold up his end of their tenuous bargain by staying, but with each passing day that voice in his head kept growing, spreading, like a cancer. He needed to move on; he wanted to stay … endless circles in his brain. The letter to Lynn, that oh-how-sweet note, still sat in his knapsack, but he had promised himself he would
tell
her when the time came. He kept it only as reminder, of how not to say goodbye.

School was out. Lee-Anne had managed to pass all of her subjects, including math (albeit with a D, thanks to those stupid Greeks), and Ryan, despite his suspension, had managed to squeak into his final year, with a strong recommendation from Pritchum Tate that the boy attend the Preachin’ Principal’s sermon every Sunday. Oddly enough, it was Ryan who had taken the role of the Little Ghost, vanishing nearly every afternoon with Ben Caldwell and returning in the wee hours. For the most part his chores had gone undone, and to pick up the slack, Kain had chipped in when he could.

The drifter glanced out the window. Fortunately, Lynn was at work; Lee was spending the weekend with her grandparents. He fully expected things to go south quickly, and they didn’t need to see it.

A half hour passed before Ryan emerged and headed down the steps. Kain followed the boy’s lead and met him halfway to the farmhouse. Sporting a baseball cap, brown shorts, and a well-worn T-shirt, the teen spoke first.

“Don’t get any ideas,” he said, and if Kain had had even a single one, it would have been to turn round, shoulder his knapsack and hit the road. If Lynn hadn’t asked him to try again (he had finally told her of their “agreement” over a cup of coffee on the veranda last night), he might have done just that.

“I’m not gettin’ back on the team.”

“Your Mom’s trying to help you, Ryan.”

“Look … we can play your little game for her sake, but I’m not g—
hey
—what’s wrong?”

A sledgehammer pounded in Kain’s head. He closed his eyes and held them shut, steeling himself against this sudden, and throbbing, ache. He staggered a bit, then set the tips of his fingers to his temples and rubbed them. He thought he might scream.

He opened his eyes. The pain had ebbed, but whoever was wielding the sledge was teasing him now, gently tapping the head of the spike it had driven so deeply into his brain. Now if only the goddamn static would stop.