The Fall: The Rift Book I

by Robert J. Duperre

  The intruder didn’t reply but seemed to glide, approaching the lighted area but never emerging from the shadows. Bizarre tendrils of long, flowing hair hovered around a woman’s form, whose features he couldn’t define. Its image became faint, solid, and then faint again, like a hologram held together by a waning power source.

  “Who are you?” asked Josh, feeling dizzy.

  It does not matter, replied the lady in the shadows.

  Sophia grunted behind him and he turned around. Her face had twisted into a mystified expression. He wondered if she could see the woman, as well.

  The shadow woman repeated her mantra: You know what must be done.

  An odd sensation overtook him. The world blurred and his dizziness became vertigo. “I’m…sorry,” he muttered while covering his eyes. “I…don’t…know.”

  Yes, you do. You have always known. Look deep down. You will see.

  “I don’t want to.”

  You have to.

  “Please…don’t make me.”

  You do not have a choice.

  Josh began to sob. He sensed that he was far away and fading. Suddenly he knew exactly what the intruder sought, and it was something he didn’t want.

  “I can’t,” he wailed. “I won’t.”

  You must, the woman said. Her image backed away from him and dissipated into the atmosphere. With a fleeting, sigh-like whimper, his lungs filled up with air.

  I will help you.

  Josh watched his own hand open the silverware drawer and remove a steak knife. He wanted to scream NO, but the desire to do so faded. He held the knife in the palm of his hand and stared at it as if he’d never seen anything so strange in all his life, while Sophia gazed at him with naïve adoration. Her glistening red lips curled into a grin that may have appeared innocent under any other circumstance. The purity of the sight made Josh’s waking mind cry out in protest.

  Stop this!

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have to.”

  He lunged at his sister, arms outstretched. He collided with her, forced her down to the debris-covered linoleum floor, and pinned her shoulders to the ground with his knees. She struggled beneath him, barking in hoarse grunts. Her flailing legs struck his back but he couldn’t feel it. He was beyond physical sensation by then.

  Josh held the knife in both hands like a dagger and positioned its tip above her right eye. The blade shimmered in the last rays of sunlight she would ever see. The eye beneath the tip bulged with either fear or hatred—the influence steering him didn’t say which, and he got the feeling it really didn’t care.

  With a swift downward stroke he plunged the knife into her eyeball. The soft membrane above the cornea parted as the cutting edge sank in. Clear fluid poured out. Sophia’s screams of protest intensified, as did her struggle. He pushed it in deeper, until the oily liquid rolled over his hands. A popping came next, and the eyeball burst. The fluid went from clear to a watered-down shade of red. Sophia writhed, but her resistance started to fade along with her shrieks. When he finally pushed the knife in all the way to the faux-wooden handle, stopping only when the tip scraped against the backside of her cranium, her body shook with a final death rattle and came to a halt.

  Josh slid off his sister’s corpse, slumped on the floor beside her, and yanked the knife from her eye socket. Strands of optic nerve were still fixed to the blade. He grimaced at the gurgling sound the deflated eye made when he withdrew and tossed the knife up over the counter and into the sink. It clanked on the metal washbasin. The persuasion that steered him told his hand to stroke her matted hair, and he did just that, caressing her like a lover and never taking his eyes off her formerly cherubic face.

  His mind was released, and his thoughts were his own again. All his pent-up fear, all his wrenching sorrow, hit him at once. His body stiffened as he felt the invader try to sneak its way back inside. He kept it at bay.

  “No!” he screamed. “Let me have this!”

  In those moments after the deed, he experienced everything: Sophia as a baby, and the prickly sensation that ran down his forearm the first time he held her tiny form; the day she lost her first tooth and the way she looked at him, lips parted in a gap-toothed grin, when she told him in her excited, four-year-old voice that now the tooth fairy would come for her; the fear she confided in him when her hormones matured and she received the dreaded, once-a-month gift of femininity for the first time; the hot summer afternoon only three months ago, when he confronted Skip Clarkson, a boy five years Sophia’s elder, who had touched her in the most inappropriate of ways, and sensed the relief and shame she expressed when he displayed for her his blood-covered knuckles after the deed had been done.

  To cap it all off, he saw her in bed during the evening that would end up being the last meaningful interaction between them. He felt her body as he held her and saw the sorrow in her eyes as she lamented the loss of her cousin and best friend. He sensed her doubt when he restated his promise that never, in a million years, would he ever let any harm come to her. It had been an unrealistic promise, one he couldn’t keep. His grief, and the driving burden that threatened to turn his insides out, took full control. It erupted from his tear ducts, from the snot that flowed from his nose, and from his sniveling gasps for air. He threw his head back and roared at the ceiling.

  “Why…FUCK!”

  Josh collapsed in a heap, his hand still entwined in a knot of Sophia’s hair. He bawled long and hard, his body shaking out of control. There would be no more happy times, he told himself. Those were all gone. There was nothing but death now, death and the suffocating weight of his guilt. His parents were dead, his sister was dead, and it was his fault.

  As daylight passed and the moon took its place, Josh still didn’t move. He was in the only place he wanted to be, the place he’d known as home for the entirety of his life, the place where he was always welcomed with open, loving arms.

  It was also a place where he wasn’t needed any longer. That fact hit him the hardest.

  * * *

  It was quiet, for the most part. The only sounds to be heard were the snores of those sleeping in the space below. Their grunts and nasal congestion conspired to keep her away from sleep, or at least that was what she told herself.

  Kyra pulled her sleeping bag up to her neck and shivered. She wasn’t sure of the time, but the familiar crick in her neck and her dry, burning eyes told her it was probably around four in the morning. The raiding party, under the guidance of General Stack, had departed an hour or so before. “Doing our part to rid the world of this plague on humanity,” the General had said. Kyra chuckled, though she felt no humor at all when she did so. She wondered if they would be okay. In her heart, she knew the answer already.

  This wasn’t what kept her awake either, though. Her real bane was the memory of her encounter with Josh Benoit earlier that day. She scrunched her nose and tried to figure out where she had gone wrong. Was I too forward? Did I say the wrong thing? Does he just not want me? She shook her head. It just didn’t seem right. She recalled how he’d kissed her neck and felt again the ardor he emitted. He was like a batch of sexual plutonium in the moment, and yet he’d seemed disinterested in her after that.

  She told herself she was selfish. That had to be the reason. He’d told her about his family, how he needed to get back to them. Who was she to keep him away? It made her realize how unimportant she was, but a part of her didn’t care. She simply wished to be granted the solace of being able to cry herself to sleep, because in the end the reality of her dream was as firm as a flaccid noodle, just like the rest of her life. This knowledge hurt.

  He just used you, like you’ve used every other man in your life, her guilt chided. How’s it feel to be on the other end?

  Frustration caused her legs to tingle. She wasn’t falling asleep any time soon and his image wouldn’t go away, no matter how much she tried to make it so. She sat up, peered at Stacy and Little Roger to make sure they were still asleep, and grabbed the last c
igarette from her pack. She glanced at the coffee can filled to the rim with butts and felt a twinge of shame, and then said screw it and lit the end.

  The front door opened, startling her. She yelped and dropped the cigarette, which rolled across the floor and fell through the crack beneath the balcony railing. She hoped there was no one sleeping below her to be burned by its glowing head. Footsteps followed, hesitant, shuffling strides, like someone trying to learn to walk again after a nasty accident. A child coughed. Kyra inched toward the balustrade and peered through the slats.

  Josh stood in the center of the church, surrounded on all sides by sleeping bags and those dozing within them. He was alone and appeared dazed, looking around before taking a couple hobbling steps forward. Then he stopped, turned around, and went in the other direction. He did this over and over again, like a toy robot.

  Kyra sat back. She couldn’t say she was happy to see him, especially considering her current mindset, yet the thought that something was wrong caused a pang of concern within her. She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and stood up.

  She descended the stairwell and entered the main chamber, the door booming when it closed behind her. Many stirred in their sleep, but Josh didn’t react. He still teetered with his back to her.

  “Josh?” she said, cautiously.

  He didn’t answer.

  She weaved through the bundles of sleeping people. When she got closer she noticed he was shaking. She tapped his shoulder.

  “Josh?”

  He turned slowly. His eyes weren’t the kind ones she remembered. They were alive with something darker now, burning the way Justin’s eyes burned the night he hit her—the eyes of a madman. His cheeks were dirty and marked with dried tears, and there was blood on his coat and neck. She took a guarded step backward.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he replied in a rough and choppy voice.

  “Okay,” she said. “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere.”

  Kyra sighed. All that waiting, all that hoping, and her payoff was for this man, who was really no more than a kid to her, to brush her aside as if she didn’t matter. She couldn’t accept that sort of behavior, not anymore. She wanted to help him, but she would only go so far if he didn’t want to accept it. I have no time for games, the irritated voice of her maturity said, though the reality was that he was beginning to scare her.

  “Fine,” she replied with a huff. “When you feel like being an adult, I’ll be upstairs. Before then, why don’t you go sit in the corner and mope.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Kyra’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say to me?”

  His brow furrowed with anger. “You heard me.”

  “You know what?” she said with a befuddled laugh. “I don’t need this shit. I try to be helpful, and you swear at me. Whatever. I didn’t piss you off, Josh. I don’t know why you’re giv—”

  “You don’t know a fucking thing!” he screamed, taking a step in her direction. Kyra looked around nervously. People were starting to wake up.

  “Just…just calm down,” she said in a shaky voice.

  “Calm down? Calm down! What the fuck do you know, bitch? You know what happened to me tonight? My family’s dead, Mrs. Holcomb. That’s right. My whole fucking family’s dead! You wanna help me? How the fuck you gonna do that? You can’t!”

  He turned from her and stormed away, throwing open the door to the old sacristy with so much force that the frame cracked. It swung closed behind him, and a minute later the sound of his bawling echoed through the church’s spacious interior. Kyra stood dead still, staring at the door and listening to that painful cry. She wondered again how she could be so stupid, so selfish.

  “What happened?” someone asked. Kyra looked to the loft entrance. Stacy was standing there, her hair a knotted mess, Little Roger fussing in her arms. Something then thumped Kyra’s foot and she glanced down to see Alice Carpenter, housewife hairdo and all, wide awake and staring at her. The woman yawned.

  “Yeah, what’s going on?”

  Kyra brought her eyes back to the door. Her dreams seemed so far away.

  “I just made things worse,” she said.

  CHAPTER 17

  NETHERWORLD

  SET BEFORE HIS TIMELESSNESS, the hallway expanded and contracted. Walls that weren’t really there swelled like a giant, ethereal lung. The air was heavy with gray mist, the physical remnants of discarded notions. He rode their stream and glided through passageways, acting as the eternal cosmonaut in the universe of lost souls. The place was much larger than he remembered, a snaking network of interlocking rooms and channels that never seemed to end.

  There were so many more portals here than there ever had been before. The sheer numbers rocked his perception and threatened to make him lose focus. He tried to block out the magnitude, or at least condense the doorways into practical dimensions, but his corporeal memories denied him such advantages. How he hated being human, even partly so. It made accomplishing his goal that much harder.

  A jolt of energy surged through him. What followed was a withering sensation, as if small pieces of him were being slowly chipped away. He’d experienced this sort of fragmentation many times in the past (it was a common occurrence for someone of his nature), but this time was different. There was a sense of urgency behind the pain, the siren’s call of intelligence, indistinguishable to most earthly facilities, that he’d been awaiting for a long time.

  His excitement grew as he glided through the vast corridors. He passed the endless rows of iridescent windows representing portals to various extensions of his ever-expanding lifeline. The apertures gleamed when he drew near them, their liquid panes shimmering with mystical energy. He felt his essence being drawn into them. It required a great amount of effort to bypass their magnetism, for he knew these passageways were inconsequential. His strength waned and his sense of self, of individuality, wavered. One moment he was perceptive, soaring through the netherworld with a distinct purpose; the next, he was any of a billion separate consciousnesses, each of whom struggled to gain a foothold and bring their consumed, integrated life-forces to the surface. Their names scrolled through his mind: Ken, Gabriella, Sharon, Ilsa, Robert, Ebenezer, Pablo, Mohammed, Samir, Yin, Guido, Abu. Above these were the windows of the second level, those of his seven sleepers like Tom Steinberg, individuals given the gift of his guidance without the restrictions inherent in his true children. He needed them to suffocate those immune to his influence, to help tear down the tower of life from the inside out, and even though he did not have total control over them, their thoughts invaded his mind with just as much potency. He hated them all, and yet needed every single one.

  I am not you, he chanted, repelling the barrage of thoughts. His own identity reemerged.

  I am I. I am Sam. There is no one else.

  How can you be sure of that, his emptiness retorted, when you cannot even remember your real name?

  Sam shrugged off the invader. Leave me alone. You mean nothing here. He had to focus, had to find the source of his restlessness before it was too late. There was no time to argue with a concept he’d given up ages ago.

  As a construct of pure will that existed underneath the ether that sheathed the physical world, the netherworld was his place. It was the one dimension built for him and him alone, the landfill in which he stored those very souls that now cried for their freedom. It was his watchtower, the place where he could sit back, observe, and wait.

  At last the portal revealed itself, beckoning to him with a rippling surface that possessed a deep red glow, the way every doorway blazed the moment before it blinked out of existence. He stopped before it and pushed the other portals aside.

  The images behind the watery curtain were muddy and vague. He focused in an attempt to create a movie screen out of a knothole, but his efforts were fruitless. A large, looming figure, a ghost in the machine, was all he could see. He sighed through imaginary lips. There was only
one way to find out for sure why this particular gateway was so important. His fingers pierced the membrane and he entered the void.

  He passed through the conduit and was immersed in the exquisite medley of pain and suffering within, crossing the threshold between instinct and intellect on a lustrous shaft of light. The intricate system of sparkling, crisscrossed threads laying the groundwork of coherent thought was marvelous, even though the fibers had corroded by then, saturated by his caustic power. It never failed to make him proud each time he saw this phenomenon. To him, there had never been anything in all of creation more beautiful.

  Synapses fired as he invaded the mind’s web, generating sparks of electricity that bounced across invisible barriers and threatened to knock him off the beam. He understood that this could not happen, for he was the one in control here, even when an embattled spirit and its defenses tried to tell him otherwise.

  As he entered into awareness, his essence smiled. The ghost of this mind’s prior resident cried out for the madness to stop. It was fully conscious of its body’s actions and powerless to control its new nature, and yet this particular inner self still pulsated with strength. He tried to wedge his way into its memories, only to be greeted by a thick wall of resistance.

  That’s odd, he thought. It wasn’t often that the remnants of an underling’s mind could stave him off.

  After a short time, the resistance waned a bit and he was allowed to roam more freely. He learned the vessel’s name (Sophia) and discovered that she was a twelve-year-old girl, with parents and an older brother whom she loved dearly. All else was hidden inside the steel trap of her memory—the where, when, how, and who remained lost to him. He concentrated and tried to pry deeper, but the scraps of this Sophia’s defiance held. In time he stopped trying. There were other ways.

  He sensed panic coursing through every fiber of the girl’s being, pulling his thoughts in along with it. Important events were happening on the outside, which meant there was only one thing to do.

  Sam looked up.

  An intense, burning pain stabbed into his skull. He couldn’t see out of his right eye. From the left one, an image came into being like a slow-developing Polaroid. A young man with wavy black hair and deep brown eyes hovered above him. The soul residue this young man existed within lightened with a sense of familiarity. This must be the brother, thought Sam. The boy’s hands were busy, twisting and pushing somewhere close but beyond Sam’s line of sight. With each thrust, the pain in his head grew more intense, more unbearable. Sam had an epiphany. He knew what this girl’s sibling was attempting to do. It explained the horrible sensation of being whittled away.