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Charisma Page 24

by Steven Barnes


  “We don’t know that he lied,” Destiny said reasonably. “We weren’t watching all the time. We don’t know everything that happened.”

  Patrick wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think that it was Mrs. Kellogg or Mrs. Coffee at all. I think that … well…”

  The others stared at him, and he found it difficult to speak. They waited. There was no hurry, no sense of anything other than that here, with each other, they had all the time in the world.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “But it’s all a bun-cha crap. We all had nightmares. Sure. But so what?”

  “So what,” Lee agreed, as if that dismissed the subject.

  They shared the booty bought from web pages, bottle deposits and mowed lawns: cartons of orange juice, low-fat Triscuits, Power Bars and fresh apples. None of them liked candy much, another thing that made the other kids mock them.

  Once, achingly long ago, they spent all their days here, had been closer to each other than to their own families. But now they could already feel the world tugging at them, pulling them further and further apart, and the feeling was frightening.

  Meal completed, they carefully wrapped their trash up in the little brown paper bags. Destiny collected the bags, and stuffed them all in one larger sack, then rolled the top down tight. When she finished, she exhaled a long, thin stream. “Can we nap?” Destiny asked somberly. Despite her youth, at that moment, she seemed like a little old woman, already riven with fear and regret. And they looked at each other, knowing that there was something real and true here, something healing, and nodded.

  The cupboards were no longer stacked with blue blankets. The sound system had been gutted long ago, and the television sets and computers were gone. But the room, its dusty floors, the light streaming obliquely through the windows, still brought a strange and soothing kind of comfort, and that was no small thing in their lives.

  They all had thin blankets or sheets in their backpacks, and rolled them out on the floor. Destiny placed hers neatly, pivoting around on her knees with the kind of quick, clever movement that Patrick loved to watch. She stopped, and bit her lip, and said, “Promise. Promise that we’ll always be friends.”

  Patrick felt a swelling within him, one part the primal, youthful ache that wants to say, yes, yes, always and forever, we’ll be together, we’ll be friends.…

  But he knew that it wouldn’t really be that way. He paid attention to little things

  (where had he first learned to do that?)

  Lee’s father was already talking about moving on, opening a print shop in Moscow, Idaho. Wanted to be closer to his aging parents. And Shermie’s dad was talking about Tahoe for the summer, out on a houseboat owned by a half-brother. And Destiny would be at camp, and then her grandmother’s. So there wouldn’t even be one last summer to cushion them. Even as Destiny said her piece, they knew that what she had asked was impossible.

  This was all there was. Maybe all there would ever be again. No matter how much they wanted to hold their friendship together, they weren’t the ones who made decisions. They were just the ones who lived by them.

  But there was no use in bitching about that, none at all.

  Do nothing that is of no use.

  And Patrick wouldn’t be the first one to say that the dream was a lie. He couldn’t, didn’t, have the heart for it. So he said, “Sure. We’ll always be friends.” And they held hands and hugged each other, and spread the blankets, lying down like the petals of a daisy, all five heads toward the middle.

  They settled in. Once, some of them had slept on sides and some on their stomachs. But that was at the beginning, and now they all slept the same way, flat on their backs. The instant they started, Patrick felt the rhythm start to pull him, felt the call of their shared pattern, breathing funneling like a river slowly picking up speed, slowly accelerating toward a roaring falls.

  It was so strange, and there was nothing that he could have done to stop it. Too many hundreds of times he had floated in these currents, and closed his eyes, listening to the sounds around him, each and every sound only taking him deeper and deeper into the dream.

  Strange, but comforting in a way even his own room at home never was. This was home. These were his brothers and his sister.

  Rapidly, rapidly, they fell toward sleep, even if it was only for a few minutes, even if only for a fragment of shared dream.

  * * *

  In that dream, Patrick was grown. He moved through a world of buildings that sometimes transmogrified into trees, if he took his eyes from them for more than a moment at a time.

  When he moved through the concrete canyons, he turned to catch a glimpse of himself in a window, and was impressed by himself. How strong he had grown.

  (“Just wait till you’re all grown up, boy,” his grandmother had said, and he had heard that, and thought that it would take an impossible time, would take until forever, and yet here it was already.)

  He was tall and strong, and handsome, wearing a three-piece suit of some kind, and his eyes were piercing. And from somewhere, something in the very back of his mind said:

  “Are you dreaming now?”

  And he knew that he was. How he knew, he wasn’t sure. It was something about looking at his reflection. Something about seeing himself, and giggling to know that the world of dreams was different from the world above

  (below)

  where he was limited to those things and experiences that the flesh could comprehend.

  But the concrete towers melted away. Suddenly he was in a forest, and the forest was dark and deep, and he had promises to keep, and miles to go …

  He stopped that thought, because there was a wind winding through the forest behind him, one that plucked at his clothes and his hair, and suddenly he had no other urge but to go, go, go, to run, and he was running, and not even certain why. The air around him was swirling as if in a whirlwind, and the leaves were bursting into flame, and he was picked up and whirled around and around in a world of—

  * * *

  Patrick sat up suddenly, completely out of the dream that had abruptly turned into a nightmare.

  The others were sitting up, too. He came very close to asking them if they had dreamed, or what they had dreamed, but at the last instant something warned him not to.

  Destiny looked a little flushed, but Lee and Shermie just looked groggy, and then a bit closed-down, as if they were thinking something that they didn’t want to say.

  Broach it? Not? Before, there was always a deeper sense of connection after their naps. Now, there were barriers, and he didn’t know why.

  Again, he started to say something, and then changed his mind.

  No. Let it go. So what that they had changed? Everything changes. Everything dies.

  33

  LOS ANGELES

  Renny walked through the offices feeling more confidence than he had in years. The overhead fluorescents seemed brighter, warmer. Paper-clotted desks looked busy and productive, not desperate. Cubbyhole cloistered coworkers seemed somehow more lively and attractive; even the general background buzz of ringing phones and clipped conversation was more attractive and welcoming. Renny may have been emotionally conflicted, but he was also cooking. Yes indeed, the man was on fire.

  Muriel was lost in a maze of papers and Post-it notes in her glass-walled office, but her eyes were drawn to him, as if threads or wires connected them. He felt hooked in.

  “Renny?” she asked.

  He stopped, not irritated, not excited. He was expectant, contained, safely within the circle of his own power. “Yes?”

  “Would you step in here for a minute?”

  “Sure.” He was almost laughing to himself. There was a touch of hysteria in that humor. I’m juggling a bomb here. “What’s up?”

  She let Renny into the office, thought for a moment, and then closed the door behind him. “Have a seat.”

  He sat “Whuzzup?” There was something in his voice that he didn’t entirely like. The pressure
of keeping the secret was starting to wear him down. Here he was, in Marcus’s building, on Marcus’s payroll, slaving to uphold his honor, sitting on a secret that could bring the whole empire crashing down.

  Muriel sat on the edge of her desk, and shifted one tanned and muscular leg over the other. She smoothed her dress down. “Well … I have to admit that I sort of thought you’d fall on your face on the hooker piece.”

  His smile felt nailed into place. “Now why in the world did you think that?”

  “Well—you’d intimated that you thought it was beneath you. And your recent work hasn’t had … that spark.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I read your piece, and I was blown away. This is really good work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “In fact, I’m thinking of kicking this up to Quanta. Barry and I had lunch today, and he thinks he can use it. Frankly, it’s too good for Eyeful.”

  “Always good to hear.” Sand wondered if he should put a bit more enthusiasm in his voice. Surely she knew that a month ago, he would have crawled across a mile of broken glass to hear those words. Now she was playing with Renny. Testing him. Watching him. Damned if she didn’t seem just a little nervous about him.

  Muriel drummed her fingers on the desk. He didn’t speak.

  “Why,” she said, “do I have a feeling that you’ve got a secret?”

  “Everyone has secrets.”

  She nodded without agreeing. “How do I put this…?”

  “Simply and honestly?”

  She laughed. It wasn’t the deep, throaty, healthy laugh that he remembered. It was something else. It was worried. “All right. You seem a lot more like the man I met seven years ago. More … alive. Or something.”

  She probably thought he had a girlfriend. And maybe he did: hardly a morning passed without a note from a very special lady in Washington. And almost every night he sat and wrote her of his days, visualizing her smile as she read the little inconsequentials. Three days ago they’d Instant Messaged each other for an hour. Life was good, but that wasn’t what Muriel was sensing, oh, no. Not at all.

  His smile remained right where it was. “I just love my job,” he said.

  “Renny, Renny, Renny,” she said, unconvinced but not knowing quite what to say. “Well, congratulations, I suppose. Oh, and by the way, there’s a package on your desk.”

  “Thanks.” He got up to leave.

  “Renny?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  She sighed. “Never mind,” she said, and then turned on a glimmer of her old, girlish charm. “Liar.”

  He grinned at her and left.

  34

  Renny drove home along Santa Monica Boulevard, hitting every red light, his mind buzzing, spinning. When he turned off Westwood into the parking lot, he was on autopilot, and couldn’t really remember how he had found his way home. He tucked his package, a thick manila envelope, under his arm and ran up the stairs, checking left and right, up and down furtively, as if afraid of surveillance. The key fumbled its way into the lock with damn little help from him.

  Every sound seemed unnaturally loud, every shadow in the hallway was a snoop and a spy. He wedged his back against the door as he closed it. The bolt slid in thickly, and the lock clicked into place. Then he finally turned on the lights.

  He threw the envelope onto his couch and forced himself to head to the kitchen and make himself a cup of coffee. The familiar ritual: measuring out the dark granules, replacing the filter, pouring the filtered water, even waiting for the first sigh of steam, all had a calming effect on his restless mind. He lit a cigarette as he waited, watching the glowing coal consume paper and tobacco as he drew. He barely tasted it, but the nicotine rush was divine.

  Finally he had a cup of steaming java, half of his second cigarette, and the nerve to venture back into the living room. He sat at his desk, sipped, turned, and stared at the wall.

  The living room’s floral green wallpaper was covered with faxed and Xeroxed photographs of murdered women. These were taped to copies of headlines, articles, interviews, speeches, webzine profiles. To gain a sense of Marcus before he retired from the armed forces, he had researched Marcus’s unit, and tracked troop movements with declassified military memos.

  All of this work in order to document Alexander Marcus’s motions over the last thirty years. The further back he went, of course, the sketchier the information became. Despite that handicap, Sand had found thirty-eight cases (thirty-eight!) of women, generally prostitutes or runaways, murdered with facial wounds attributed to human bites. All were within fifty miles of a Marcus appearance.

  Thirty-eight. There might have been two, or three, or five times that number. God in heaven.

  Every time he looked at the chart, his stomach dropped again. Holding a secret of this magnitude was absolutely killing him. Sand was shaking as he turned on his desktop computer. As it booted, he opened a book from a stack of books and magazines that he’d collected.

  Well, this was it, the story he had searched for his entire life. All he had to do was be certain. Really certain. Of two things:

  First, of Marcus’s guilt. It looked inarguable now. It wasn’t one of his bodyguards. It wasn’t a coincidence. It was Marcus himself, and if anything, the Praetorians had helped him cover it up.

  Second, he had to be certain that he, Renny Sand, could actually break the story. He was killing a part of himself by doing this, and could hear it screaming in the very back of his heart.

  Finally, Renny picked up the manila envelope and opened it. About three hundred pages of manuscript bound into a blue folder slid out. Alexander Marcus—A Life in Shadow.

  He read into the night. It was pulp stuff, digging into Marcus’s childhood in ways no other biographer ever had. The reporter, a former Washington Post columnist who wrote a single best-selling exposé before spiraling into alcohol-fueled depression, had apparently unearthed sources no one else had ever discovered. Fascinating, sleazy, and slightly embarrassing. Revelatory, but certainly far less damning than the information currently displayed on Renny’s wall.

  He hated every word he read, but couldn’t stop himself.

  What happens when you kill your heroes? When the last of your illusions is dead?

  Maybe, just maybe that’s when you finally become an adult.

  Or maybe he was just lying to himself. Again. He had become so very good at that, over the years.

  But he had a thread now. Amidst all the lies and tacky self-justification a slender thread connecting him to something honest. A thread that stretched from Los Angeles north to a place called Claremont.

  Renny continued to read.

  35

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  Talisa Kramer couldn’t breathe. The air was so tight, so hot, that every attempt to salve her lungs brought more pain than relief. Without much success she fought to place the events leading to her imprisonment in some kind of order, some kind of logical sequence.

  The main thing was to avoid panic. Panic was a killer, however reasonable a response panic might seem.

  A mad bubble of laughter gurgled in her throat. She didn’t dare to let that bubble rise. Laughter was the last thing she could afford. Laughter would be the beginning of the end, the admission that her sanity had broken, and that regardless of her captor’s intent, her mind was already lost. That the body of Talisa Kramer might live on, but her spirit was dead, or transformed into something unrecognizable.

  She lay on her side in an utterly dark, confined space that she could only believe was the trunk of a car. A car. Now she remembered. She remembered traveling to the motel in a car. She remembered that the room had been far away from the road. More cars. There seemed to be a tiny island of memory, surrounded by an ocean of dread. Her mind was only giving her a few pieces at a time, just enough to allow her to understand what had happened, but nothing more than that.

  She remembered what had happened in the room. Strange. The thin man had promised her a secret, promi
sed that someone famous would be waiting for her, that it would be a special treat.

  This would be good. She had had famous men before. A rap singer who had done a gig in town. Another time, she serviced the host of an MTV game show. They were the same as any other men. When she first began this long, lonely road, some part of her had expected that famous people might be different. Nicer, perhaps. Sexier. Perhaps she expected them to be bigger down there, or somehow golden.…

  But she found that they were just like other men, except that they had more money, and expected others to see their importance, to be cowed by it.

  But the promised “important man” hadn’t been in the motel room. And although disappointed, she had already been paid, and went through the motions as she had so many times before.

  The night began reasonably enough, with Talisa maintaining the kind of control that she liked. When in control, Talisa never sold herself, only rented. She determined the time and the place, and the ways, and the price.

  She had control when she walked the street near the airport. She liked the sounds, and the smells. She liked the old walk-up flophouses, and the ancient women peering down from the second-story windows. She liked knowing that if she made a single misstep, she would join them one day. There was something frightening about that, but exciting, too. It tested her control. It was like walking a tightrope across a pool of sharks. Every additional twenty-four hours of survival reinforced her essential uniqueness. Not everyone could walk that line without falling off. She had something special. She was a star, only no one had realized it yet.

  A girlhood in Innes, Texas, had been made tolerable by dreams of Hollywood. She dreamed of the glitz, and the images from the glamour magazines, and the movies where golden people made golden love to the accompaniment of stereo-surround soundtracks. In her fantasies, sex wasn’t this wet, grubby thing that she had learned in the backseats of cars, in dingy motel rooms, at the blunt, weathered hands of the man her mother wanted her to call Father.

  So she left home, hitching, planning to hitch all the way along the 10 Freeway to Malibu. Talisa would wait tables, and eventually someone would discover her, because there was something inside her, something deep and hidden, that she knew was pure, and good.

 

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