96. weird, USA.
JUNE 8TH, 2011 (WASHINGTON) -- CONTINUED
“I don’t know why-”
Charlie’s sentence was cut off by a hoarse gasp. The book fell from her hand. She doubled over, clutching at her arm.
“Charlie?” Olivia grabbed her, fear spicing her blood. “What’s wrong?”
“Ben,” she whispered, tears spilling over her lashes. “He’s hurt, someone’s-oh God, it’s happening. Ben!”
*****
Robbie felt it coming with all the inevitability of a freight train. He straightened in his chair, the whites of his eyes visible as he stared at Danny. His hands clenched into shaking white fists, the nails cutting into the softer flesh of his palms.
“It’s happening. Right now. Danny, Ben’s dying.”
Then the vision rolled over him, blotting everything out with screaming darkness and blood.
“Jesus!” Kruger swore, throwing herself at the door as Robbie fell from the chair seizing. “Call emergency services!” she shouted back at Dr. Stampe as she rushed into the interrogation room.
“Rob, Robbie, Rob,” Danny cried, kneeling beside him, trying vainly to hold him steady as his head struck the floor. “Robbie, I’m not ready, please, please, no, I can’t do this. Not now. Please.”
Kruger grabbed Robbie’s arms, feeling a strange and numbingly cold resistance in the air as she did so, and gritted her teeth as she tried to keep his head from cracking against the concrete. “Beechum, if you fucking die in here, I will find a way to bring your ghost up on charges of hampering an investigation and being an all around pain in my ass. Do you hear me?”
Danny stared down at his shaking cousin. The images of the vision were just at the edge, almost visible if he only turned to look at them properly. But he knew what he would see. He would see a good man dying, blood flowing from an irreparable wound across his throat. And the pit of indecision in what remained of his heart suddenly hardened into firm resolve.
He looked at Robbie’s face one last time. “I’m so sorry, Robbie. Forgive me.”
Then he closed his eyes and looked through Ben’s.
*****
He staggered back, feet slipping against the plastic sheet, clutching at his bleeding arm. “Mel! Stop!”
“Must. No other way. Must.” The woman stepped closer, face waxen and utterly blank, her mouth gaping open as if a string had been cut. The butcher knife in her hand glinted in the light of the solitary exposed bulb, its edge already wet and red from the slice she had made across his arm.
“You’re a good woman-I know you are. No one could talk like that without having some goodness. Please. Please, just stop.”
“The voice demands blood. Blood sacrifice. Special blood. Your blood.” She spoke tonelessly, moved stiffly, like a robotic marionette being dragged along by an invisible puppeteer.
The fear was almost overpowering, made him feel sluggish and stupid. He wanted to scream for help, anything, to let the outside world hear what was going on. But his tongue was thick and heavy in his dry mouth.
Robbie had been right. Nothing could have really prepared him for this.
He feinted to the left, hoping to catch her off guard and break past for the door. She was shorter than him and older-surely she would be slower, easier to knock aside. But she whipped like a striking viper with a vicious hiss to match, blade flashing out to nick his shoulder. She swept her arm backhanded and though he dodged the blade a dark force emanated from her, hitting him hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. He recoiled and almost lost his footing, sliding across the plastic. The panic threatened to choke him. If he fell, that would be it.
And then he felt it. A tiny spot of heat against his chest, just over his heart, growing warmer and warmer until his skin must surely be burning. But with the heat came clarity. A rush of adrenaline that cleared away the cobwebs and shocked his limbs into purposeful movement. Ben reached up to the thong around his neck and yanked with the strength of desperation. The dragonfly pendant swung back and forth from his hand, a pinprick of blinding light.
Mel hissed again, an inhumanly ferocious sound, and drew back at the sight.
“I know you’re still in there somewhere, Mel. Something’s controlling you. Fight it. Fight back!”
But she lunged forward, hand knocking the pendant aside as the other lifted the hungry knife.
*****
Charlie tore down the street, heedless of the rain or the cars that swerved to avoid her, their drivers falling angrily onto the horns as she ran. Olivia struggled to keep up, fighting against hyperventilation, every muscle in her body screaming a desperate no.
“Don’t you die on me, Benjamin Hawthorne!” Charlie screamed to the sky. The pendant around her throat bounced wildly with each furious step, its faint glow lighting the way, pulling her onwards like a magnet. “Don’t you fucking dare!”
*****
Time was such an impossible thing.
There had been interminable days in boring classes, in waiting rooms, on dull Sundays, when it had stretched into warm taffy. When each tick of a second had taken an hour to echo.
This was the slowest it had ever been. As Ben stared at the falling knife, he felt as though they had frozen in some impossible tableau. It wasn’t just that time had slowed-it had actually stopped. He could not move, could not breathe; but he could think about everything that had been. All the days leading up to this moment. For thinking, he had all the time in the world.
No time for escape. Only for memories.
Perhaps this was what everyone’s last moment of life felt like. He tried to close his eyes for the inevitable flashing of his past but couldn’t. Movement was impossible now.
The bang of energy was barely audible but felt like an explosion. And suddenly time had resumed, the knife was falling faster and faster-
And Danny’s hand shot out to grab Mel’s wrist and twist the blade away with a sharp crack. Ben fell back, his legs crumpling beneath him, the air rushing back into his lungs with a shocked gasp.
Mel screeched and howled, her hair flying wildly as she twisted and snapped at Danny, biting at him like a chained dog, while he held on with a steely determination that was frightening. The dark glasses flew from her face to crack against the floor. And as she whirled around, Ben saw the truth.
The matte black finish of her eyes, the writhing dark tentacles of an aura that was not possibly human. Mel Bernstein’s body was not her own. There was something crouching inside of her, malevolent and implacably hungry, a violent evil driving her. Something older than time that only knew hate and fear.
“Not today,” Danny screamed. There were translucent tears on his face, a terrible grief and fury in his eyes. “Not ever again. You can’t have him. You’ll have to rip me to shreds before you touch him.”
“That can be arranged,” Mel hissed.
Ben shouted a wordless warning as the black aura exploded from the woman, engulfing Danny, wrapping him in tarry strings that whispered and undulated with an unnatural life of their own. His scream transcended sound and echoed in the marrow, a keening of terrible suffering. As the tentacles lashed and swayed there was the audible noise of ripping and tearing. Fog-like fragments of Danny’s spiritual form flew through the air, spattering onto the floor and walls like clear blood. Ben felt bile burning his throat even as the tears stung his eyes-Danny was literally being torn apart before him.
And he had no idea what to do.
Charlie pounded up the wide stone steps, not entirely sure how she knew this was the place but utterly certain nonetheless. The doorknob twisted in her hand but refused to open. Without a second’s pause she stepped back and kicked forward sharply, the wood splintering explosively around the lock. Olivia tried to rush forward but Charlie blocked her with one arm, roughly pushing her behind her to shield her from whatever waited inside as she stepped forward.
What they found almost made them turn back.
Danny may have been invisible to their eyes but the shadow certainly was not. It coated him like a tarry second skin, outlining his thrashing, desperate struggles. As they stepped forward Mel turned sharply, jerked by a hose-like tether sprouting from her chest that connected her to the writhing mass engulfing Danny. Meeting her hollowed-out eyes was literally nauseating; Olivia stepped back, clamping a hand to her mouth as her eyes bulged in horror.
“Another,” Mel hissed through gritted teeth, swaying. There was nothing about the movement that suggested weakness; like the cobra hearing the hypnotizing rhythm of the charmer’s pipe, Mel was in the grip of something powerful and seductive. “A pair. A delicious pair. I know that blood. I’ve tasted it before.”
Olivia’s eyes darted to Ben, lying crumpled on his side. He had one hand clamped around his forearm, attempting to staunch the blood that trickled between his fingers and dripped onto the floor. A small but growing crimson puddle spread out across the clear plastic beneath him. His face was pale from pain and fear, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, and when his eyes finally met hers she saw nothing but agony there. He looked to the black form that moved more slowly and weakly with each passing second-and she knew the pain he felt was not wholly his own.
Charlie met Mel’s soulless eyes resolutely, ignoring the frantic drumming of her heartbeat in her ears as she struggled to think quickly. The shadow was using the woman as a vessel, moving her about as if it were a kid with a remote control. It was attacking Danny directly-but perhaps it used the woman because it had no other way to physically harm a mortal. A shadow couldn’t hold a knife.
Thus: remove the puppet; remove the direct threat, i.e. the knife. Which should have been simple enough. The woman alone hardly looked strong enough to sustain a firm kick to the chest. But something told Charlie that an outright blitz attack would be useless. She would have to use something else…
And it hit her like the proverbial bolt of lightning. It was as if a voice had whispered the answer in her ear. Wherever the answer had come from, she didn’t care. Because her gaze moved down to Ben and took in the blood, the tears, the rictus of soul-deep pain across a face she knew far better than her own. And the white hot rage she felt at such an intimate attack shot through her veins like a destructive Molotov cocktail.
Destructive for it, anyway.
“You fucked with the wrong family,” Charlie said, reaching up and ripping the dragonfly pendant from her neck. She held it aloft like a shield, as a priest wielded a crucifix against the demonic, and strode forward fearlessly.
The pale glow that had guided her there flared and pulsed with all the intensity and heat of a star being born. The light dazzled her, shot fragmented rainbows across her eyes, and still she walked forward. Mel shrieked, clawed hands covering her face as she staggered backwards. Charlie didn’t hear it, didn’t hear anything but the furious beat of her own heart and then-suddenly-a second in perfect counterpoint. She knew it was Ben’s, knew it in the way she knew her own name, and then all she could see or think of was her brother. Her doting, responsible, boring, emotional, perfect brother. All of the skinned knees, shared meals, exasperating conversations, long walks, heated arguments, hugs and punches, jokes and silent understandings. An entire life in duplicate, nothing secret even when unspoken. He would always be hers just as she would always be his, and no other friend or love would ever truly match what they had. Everyone would be strangers looking in-it was theirs and theirs alone.
“How dare you touch my brother?” Charlie demanded in a voice hard and cold. “How dare you harm what’s mine? How. Dare. You.”
She thrust out, the bone amulet meeting with the woman’s forehead. A high and horrific shriek of pain escaped her. She clawed at Charlie’s arm, nails ineffectual against such steeled fury, the hand gripping the knife frozen at her side though her arm struggled frantically to raise it. The skin began to sizzle and smoke, to blacken and peel away from the symbol that had come to mean family, history, and love. And then the scream abruptly ended. Mel Bernstein’s head snapped back with neck-cracking force. Her entire body sagged as if abruptly emptied. She fell heavily onto her side, pale and unconscious, the butcher knife clattering against the floor.
The reason was apparent-the tether between Mel and Danny had severed. The shadow alone remained. Its vicious, whipping movements slowed; it was no longer as concerned with destroying the ghost. The blackness oozed and pulsated like a blood-fat slug. As Charlie turned to face it a long tentacle crept towards her, whispering in an inhuman language that made the skin crawl and the ears ache. Everything about it screamed wrong.
Olivia had been edging towards Ben, keeping close to the walls, but froze as a tentacle lashed out at her.
“You’re not interested in her,” Charlie said, reaching out and grabbing the closest piece of it. Her hand immediately went numb and nerveless, but she gritted her teeth and forced her fingers to tighten through sheer force of will. “In a moment, you’re not going to be interested in anything.”
“We are eternal,” spoke something without lips, or lungs, or mercy. “You are fleeting. We can promise forever. Become part of us. Let us sing to you in the night.”
“No dice.” Charlie pulled, yanking the thing closer. Olivia stared with wide, white eyes, but saw something on her face that made her nod and continue towards Ben.
“Danny,” Ben murmured as she knelt beside him, digging her nails into the fabric of her skirt, ruthlessly tearing a long strip from it and winding it around his bloody arm. “It’s hurting him. It’s destroying him.”
“Trust Charlie,” Olivia whispered, applying pressure until he winced and sucked in a sharp breath.
“It’ll kill her,” Ben said, panic sharpening his voice.
“Let it try. It won’t be the last to meet its match in her.”
“Do not be foolish, girl,” it hissed silkenly, in a voice as metallic as it was organic, an unholy mixture that was far too intimate. “Nothing of this world can harm us. We are eternal.”
“I don’t think that word means what you think it means,” Charlie said. The numbness was spreading up her arm, deadening the skin and muscle up to her elbow. The coldness of it made her teeth chatter. Her thoughts were beginning to slow in a haze of snow.
“We outlast all. We are the darkness beneath beds, the shadows of black holes, the emptiness in the hearts of those forgotten by an uncaring universe. We know all. We see all. We are the end of all things. We were before. We will be after. There is nothing that can kill darkness.”
“Really?” Charlie said, sinking slowly to her knees, bowing her head to hide her face. “Is that true?” Her free hand slid slowly down her leg to the hem of her jeans, slipped beneath the fabric, brushed against the leather sheath strapped to her calf.
“Yessss,” the voice purred. “Do you finally see? Do you accept the inevitable? We will give you such peace. For what do humans fear and love more than the dark?”
“I can think of something,” Charlie said quietly, hand rising. “The light.”
She lunged forward and stabbed October’s crystal knife into the heart of the undulating mass.
The reaction was nothing short of explosive. There was a rending scream of a pig being slaughtered, a concussive blast that threw Charlie back and made Olivia curl her body protectively around Ben, a disjointed ripple of time and space itself shattering and reforming in a simultaneous instant. In the aftermath, everything echoed and everything ached.
Charlie pushed herself up awkwardly, arm tingling with painful pins and needles as if she’d fallen asleep on it-but the feeling was returning, and her fingers moved without too much concentration. She looked at Ben and Olivia as they slowly straightened and felt the most profound sense of relief. They were safe. It was done. She’d killed the damn thing.
Then her eyes moved down to the crystalline dagger lying on the plastic-covered floor. It was no longer prismatic and clear but an oily black. She picked it up gingerly by the hilt and held it up to the light. Slowly, incrementally, the darkness began to fade in the yellow light, dwindling into the smallest pinprick of black. Soon it had disappeared completely-and then the knife glittered pure and uncorrupted once more, restored to its previous luster.
“Bitch,” Charlie said dismissively with a wicked smile.
“Danny,” Ben said hoarsely, reaching out. She turned sharply to stare at her brother, smile disappearing.
When the dagger had struck the shadow Danny had been thrown free, tearing away from the malicious tendrils to collapse in a huddled lump. He lay colorless and vague against the floor, unmoving. There were long pale stripes along his arms, legs, torso-vast swathes of him were missing all sense of hue or texture, impossible and deep wounds from the shadow’s touch.
“Danny.”
Ben reached out, fingers falling through the insubstantial arm. But the ghost moved, turning his head stiffly to fix agonized eyes on him.
“I killed Robbie,” he whispered, voice so weak it was almost inaudible. “To get here in time.”
“No,” Ben said, shaking his head. “No, the police would have resuscitated him.”
“I killed him. I can feel it. He’s gone.”
“Oh, oh God,” Ben felt the sob rise up in his throat, choking him.
“He wanted it this way,” Danny said, a tear trickling down his opaque cheek. “All our lives, I was selfish. I took. He gave. At the end, I knew. I had to give. I had to give him what he wanted. He wanted you to live, Ben. So live for Robbie. Live for us.”
A soft creak drew Ben’s reddened eyes away from the fading ghost. A door loomed over them, simple pine painted a pale green. Vines were carved along the frame. As Ben stared the copper doorknob twisted and rattled until the door opened, slowly swinging inward. Light poured into the room, as pale and white as a spring’s dawn. A soft breeze followed it, redolent of roses.
Danny struggled upright, eyes wide with something far sweeter than agony. He stretched out a trembling hand, insubstantially body sagging with the effort it take to move.
“I think that’s yours, Danny Boy,” Ben whispered through the tears. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Danny looked back, one final bittersweet glance. “Live a life people will envy, mate,” he said, a tremulous smile on his tearstained face.
The door swung shut and was gone.
*****
“Come on, Beechum. Don’t do this. Come on.”
Kruger started the compressions again, layered hands pumping against his chest. She tilted his head, pinched his nose, and puffed another breath of air down his throat.
“Emily,” Dr. Stampe said quietly, laying a hand against her shoulder. “Emily, you’ve done all you can. No one can fault you for this.”
“It’s not about fault, Carina!” Kruger snapped. “This kid is twenty-two years old! I’m not giving up until the paramedics get here-”
Robbie bucked sharply as if jolted by electricity, gasping harshly. Color flooded back into his face. Kruger barked a laugh in relief, rocking back to sit on her heels. “Thank God for that! You know, Beechum, I think you’re going to go down in my books as my own personal Kook.”
There was no snappy comeback or smart-ass remark. His chest rose and fell gently with breath, but his eyes didn’t open, his mouth didn’t twitch. There was no reaction.
“Straight through there,” someone said in the hall. A moment later one of the station’s paramedics was kneeling beside them, quickly checking Robbie’s vitals.
“He seized and then stopped breathing?”
“Yes. For at least five minutes. I did CPR; he started breathing again just a few seconds ago.”
“Good work,” the paramedic said appraisingly, giving the deputy a short glance. “Much longer and the boy would be brain dead. As it is, he’s not responding as well as I’d like. He needs to be transferred to the hospital immediately. We’ll run some tests, try to pinpoint exactly what happened. Can you notify the next of kin?”
“She’s already on her way.”
They watched as he stabilized Robbie’s neck. A moment later a second paramedic entered with a board to carry him out to the ambulance. The pair worked at a capable, professional speed and were gone in barely a minute.
“What are you doing now?” Dr. Stampe asked as Kruger started towards her desk.
“Looking for the punk’s phone. I think I should let his girlfriend know what’s happened.”