The car had flipped four times before West became too disoriented to keep track of what was happening. There was no traffic in the oncoming lane, which was a blessing, but the front end of the Mustang Boss tore through the barrier on the far side of the road with enough force to sheer the chassis immediately before the cockpit, the engine block tearing away with the bulk of the front bodywork. The car continued to somersault, still traveling over one hundred miles per hour without the engine. The passenger side collided with a tree, altering the spin of the car and slowing it considerably.
When it finally touched down again, the rear end of the car hit the forest floor with enough force to cut a twelve foot trench through the mud, bracken and foliage, collapsing the passenger door and a large part of the roof. They came to a rest in the middle of a heavily wooded area, rocking back and forth before the Boss creaked and moaned its final death rattle.
Stephanie’s breathing was shallow and wheezing. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that breathing was a good sign. It hurt to breathe though, not like asthma, although the couple of times she’d had attacks they had been very unpleasant. This felt more like someone was turning a knife in her side every time she inhaled.
She opened her eyes and was dismayed by the fact that she couldn’t see anything. As she let her eyes adjust to the light, dismay turned to horror. She could sense that there was light, vague dark shapes moving against a glowing field, but she couldn’t see anything. She opened her mouth to shout for help; the sound was distant and muffled. She wondered momentarily if this was due to the fact that she was struggling to vocalize because of her restricted breathing, but the realization dawned quickly that all of the sounds she could make out were muffled and distant. With her mouth open, she felt her stomach twist in knots and the bile rise in her throat, but unable to move, she began to choke on her vomit. She didn’t believe in hell, but sometimes she’d tried to imagine it. She longed for that now; that imagined vision of fire and brimstone would surely have been more bearable.
“Pull it.”
“It’s going to rip her hand off!”
“What do you not understand about what we are? Pull it!”
Charlene yanked on the twisted car door which was pinning Stephanie’s arm beneath it. The creaking sound of metal formed a grotesque counterpoint to the sound of crunching and tearing which Charlene could still make out over the cacophony of noises and she gagged as she suddenly saw the child’s face with bloody vomit dripping from the side of her mouth.
West kicked the front seat out of the way, bolts shearing from the body of the car effortlessly. He stooped into the wreck and pushed an arm under Stephanie’s head and down her back with a fluid motion, lifting her with the rigid support of his locked joints and tight muscles. With his free hand, he ripped the front passenger seat away from Stephanie’s legs and then cradled them as he pulled her slowly away from the crumpled rear of the car.
Stephanie was destroyed, eyes recognizable as such only because of their positioning, the sides of her skull caved in such a way that he could see her jaw bones jutting through the skin of her cheek.
“She’s …” Charlene started, hurrying around the wreckage to be by Stephanie’s side.
“She is Leechborn Charlene. She is Leechborn and she listened to me and she will live.”
Looking at the child, Charlene couldn’t imagine, even given the things that she had witnessed and the changes she had undergone herself, she couldn’t fathom what force of nature could bring Stephanie from the brink.
With great effort, West bit into the flesh of his arm and tried to remember the need, the controlling force that would bring the leeches out of the wound. The ripped flesh healed almost as quickly as he had bitten. He stared at Stephanie’s face and tried to imagine David, the devastation and despair that would pull his world apart if he was to return to him now. The thought solid and fixed in his mind, again he tore at the flesh of his arm and again, the wound healed, the skin pulling inward and knitting together perfectly.
“What’s wrong? What are you trying to do?” Charlene asked, frenetic, desperate to help, but at a complete loss as to what she could do.
West felt the child’s body convulse and saw the veins of her forehead bulge as she coughed up more of the deep red vomit. And it was there; the thought, the desperation, the memory that had been lost to him for more than a century. He watched the flesh of his arm, the bulge, the ripple of movement, then he opened his mouth wide and bit, flesh, leech and blood, spitting the unsavory mess onto the side of Stephanie’s skull. She was Leechborn, yes, he could see that she had survived where others would have died, but survival wasn’t enough now. He needed her to be fighting fit and he needed it to happen now. The sirens were distant, but they were there. He looked about, trying to get some sort of bearing on their position, but the trees were thick enough that he was unable to see the road.
His words were forceful and commanding, “Charlene, pull up as much of the leaves and bracken as you can and cover the car. Do it quickly.” He watched the adult leech at work on Stephanie’s skull, the skin already taut over the bone, the rips and cuts sealing, the bones being broken down quickly and rebuilt. It had been many years since he’d seen a one so beautifully wrecked as she; beautiful because she would be whole again, beautiful because in her ruination, West could bare witness to all that they were, their ability to endure, the absolute resilience of his kind. Almost unaware he was doing it, West tore at the flesh of his other wrist, fluting his lips as he sent the life giver, the Delver of Allim, the Tongue of Antrusca, licking away the blood, swallowing the pain, rebuilding its new host body.
A thousand images, all at once and all of a one. Stephanie let her eyelids fall, her head rocking against West’s chest as he ran. She tried again, allowing the light in, eyelids parting slowly; a thousand thousand images, a million hues with depths of tonal saturation varying so wildly that it was like seeing the world through a kaleidoscope viewed through a prism viewed through a migraine induced hallucination.
“West?”
Unseen by Stephanie, West smiled. Her recovery had taken a matter of minutes, scarcely enough time for the police to have made it off the exit ramp, let alone time for them to figure out where the Boss’s cockpit had finally landed.
“Yes?”
“I can’t see properly.”
West stood still for a moment, Charlene coming to a halt a few steps behind him, thankful for the brief respite.
“Open your eyes.”
Stephanie blinked apprehensively, utterly bewildered by the shifting myriad of colors and shapes.
“Well, Stephanie … I can honestly say that’s something I’ve never seen before.”
Charlene rested a hand on his shoulder and looked down at Stephanie’s face, gasping as she looked into the child’s eyes.
“What? What’s wrong?”
West hugged her a little closer to his chest, “Nothing is wrong, don’t panic. It’s just that, for some reason, the leeches have decided that right now you would benefit from having compound lens irises.”
Stephanie kicked the term around in her mind, trying to find an image to connect it with. She knew she had heard it before.
“Like a fly?”
“Yup.”
She smiled and stuck her tongue out, opening her eyes wider.
“I can’t see though.”
Her smile melted all of the tension in Charlene’s body, so palpable was her relief that Stephanie wasn’t going to fold under the stress of this new experience. She found it hard to look away from such an unworldly sight. There were still the whites of her eyes, not bloodshot, but rather more pearlescent than they should be, then, raised fractionally more from the eye’s orb than a normal iris and bearing no pupil, Stephanie’s lenses flickered a thousand shades of green and blue.
West started to move again, “Keep looking Stephanie. It may take your brain a little while to adjust. If it’s too much for you though, I would imagine that if you close your eyes an
d concentrate on seeing normally again, the leeches will put you right. It’s just a guess though. I can’t tell you how to take control of the leeches; they think they know what’s best for you and they’re usually right.”
Stephanie kept her eyes wide open, imagining that she was staring up at the place where West’s face would be, “I want to see. I mean, I want to see what it’s like.”
As Charlene rummaged through the bag she’d salvaged from the car wreck and passed her another handful of teriyaki jerky, Stephanie closed her left eye and concentrated on trying to interpret the information she received from her right eye. There was too much to see, so many separate fields of vision. She was aware of movement, thousands of facets of light swirling and twitching in an ocean of darkness. There were moments, fractions of moments when she thought she could make out a canopy of leaves, but then the leaves would dissolve into a whirling torrential sky of dazzlingly bright stars. She closed her right eye, then opening her left she looked from side to side. A cluster of bright moving shapes started to resolve and her concentration became so focused that her breathing slowed almost to a standstill. She could see West’s face, but not as she’d ever seen it, not as she’d seen anything in her life.
From her perspective, the curve of his chin and lips presented a lavish landscape of detail, each pore visible as a crevice, each wrinkle a deeply etched ravine. She could see the distance from the tip of every stubbly hair to the concave pit in which it was embedded, yet at the same time, she was able to see her own eyelashes and the tiny flecks of dust which alighted on them. More than that, there was a depth to the air; colors flowing from West’s mouth and nostrils as he breathed, eddies and whirls of blues and reds describing the contoured movements of the air currents. When she again opened her right eye, it took all of her reserves of concentration, but she found gradually that she was able to align the overlapping images presented by the two independent groups of lenses. The resulting image was such a complex and rich vista that she was emotionally shaken. She wondered, with all of the bitter sweet melancholy that her seven years allowed her, why she had never seen the world in all its beauty.
Oblivious to Stephanie’s epiphany, West and Charlene reached the edge of the wooded area and stood together looking out at the quiet, small-town subdivision in front of them. The sirens were still within earshot, but there was no sign of immanent danger, so West took the lead, and they ran.
Cobb sat alone in the Pontiac. He watched Stanwick leaning her head into the passenger window of the Chevelle. He contemplated making a brake for one of the stores down the road, imagining that he could ask to use a phone, but he kept coming to the same question; who would he call? It wasn’t obvious that he could trust Stanwick, or any of the others, but they had trusted him enough to bring him along, which had to stand for something. He had trusted his colleagues. He had trusted the members of the New York Field Office, but his trust had been misplaced. No, making a call, trying to run; those weren’t real options, not at least until he really understood these people.
He looked at the clock. Three fifteen. Stanwick had asked him to stay in the car because she was going to try and calm David’s fears. She didn’t need to explain, it was understandable that David would be feeling pretty frenetic, waiting for his daughter’s return. On the drive to Mechanicsburg, he’d tried to ask Stanwick about what had happened in the gas station. He’d been a mess, but he had still been with it enough to know what he’d seen. Stephanie was feral, crazed and she’d taken down a grown man with brutal ease. He glanced again at the store, and checked off another sound reason for not making a run for it.
Cobb closed his eyes and let his memories drift and tumble. He had never been naive about the work he performed with the Bureau. The public perception was that there were gray areas, and activities that crossed lines. He’d listened with gritted teeth over the years as the press talked about the stripping of civil liberties and unconstitutional behavior. It had always been his understanding that it was not part of his job to cross lines. It was his job to ensure that the lines were real, perceived, and adhered to by those who stood on the wrong side of those lines. Where were the lines now? Had anyone on his team been on the straight?
He opened his eyes and saw that Stanwick was walking back towards the car. ‘Know yourself and not your enemies, you win some, you lose some,’ he thought, then he looked down at the swim shorts he was still wearing and he wondered what Sun Tzu would have to say about this situation.
“What have you got to smile about?”
Stanwick’s voice was cutting, but her eyes told a softer story.
“Have you read Sun Tzu?”
“No, but I did read the first one, which is supposedly a much more upbeat affair.”
Cobb laughed, “The Art Of War …”
Stanwick raised her eyebrows and patted his arm condescendingly.
“I was just wondering how he finished the equation, ‘know not your enemy or yourself’.”
Stanwick smirked, “It translates roughly to the modern vernacular as, ‘you’re screwed.’ I paraphrase of course, but he would have approved of the translation.”
Cobb’s hands fretted over the hem of his borrowed shorts, attempting to provide better coverage for his legs. He’d been on the losing side in the apartment, but he’d survived, then the girl had saved him at the gas station. He wondered, did that mean by default that he knew himself better than he realized? Who was he to question the wisdom of the ancients?
“How is David holding up?”
Stanwick shrugged, “He’s panicky. He needn’t worry. West is late, but he’s not that late.”
She watched Cobb’s eyes as he glanced at the clock and she was pleased to note that he seemed concerned.
“You know Brad, the time could be put to better use.” Her right hand went to his left knee, stroking playfully. Cobb coughed and shuffled awkwardly, nowhere for him to go. Stanwick smiled as she moved her fingers under the loose fitting synthetic material.
“Knock it off!” Cobb’s voice came as a high pitched plea, his cheeks reddening immediately. He tried again, talking in a gruff and commanding voice “I mean, knock it off.” .
Stanwick sighed and pushed her head back against the car seat, pulling her hand away as she reached into the back seat for the food.
“You’re no use to me anyway,” she muttered bitterly, “I’d just break you.”
Cobb had never been broken. He looked out of the passenger side window in a failed attempt at stopping the flow of images that rushed through his mind. He wanted someone to break him.
“I can see them all around us, people walking and running, then they disappear.”
“There’s only us here,” West assured her again, “but I have no way of guessing what you’re seeing Stephanie, I’ve never known this happen to any other Leechborn.” Stephanie walked between Charlene and West, holding onto their hands and swinging their arms as she went.
“Do you think it could be ghosts?” Stephanie asked, curious rather than scared. As soon as West had set her down to walk, she had started to see them and thought nothing of it at first, assuming the neighborhood was simply bustling with activity. When a girl had ran out into the street in front of her and then vanished, Stephanie was more taken aback by the fact that neither West or Charlene seemed to notice.
West laughed, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but who knows? You’re sure it’s not just the shape of those swirls of air you were talking about?”
“No!” she replied defiantly, “They’re different. It’s definitely people. I can see them walking around, then they disappear.”
Charlene squeezed her hand, “Are you scared of ghosts?”
“I don’t know. Are they scary?”
Charlene looked towards the end of the street they were crossing, the sound of a car engine drawing her attention to a police patrol heading away from them, “I don’t believe in them either Stephanie, but you’re a good girl; I would think even if that is what you�
�re seeing, you’ve got nothing to be scared of.”
Stephanie waved Charlene’s arm harder in acknowledgment of her words of comfort.
West led them towards a long curving country road which wound out of the neighborhood they were passing through. He quickly found a break in the hedges and pushed through so that the three of them could walk in the fields while still allowing them to follow the course of the road into Mechanicsburg. Stephanie pulled hard on West and Charlene’s hands, swinging herself forward, then suddenly she yelled, “Stop!” and as she did, she dropped her weight and planted her feet firmly in the soil.
“What? What is it?” West asked, worrying that perhaps Stephanie had noticed something that he’d missed.
Stephanie squinted, trying to sift through all of the information that her eyes conveyed to her brain. She could see the pollen, spinning and drifting on the warm breeze, the shifting beams of light which formed many colored curtains in the air and … yes, there in front of them, she imagined that she could see three figures walking off ahead of them. It wasn’t imagined though, she knew it wasn’t. She watched the middle of the three figures swinging between the other two, watched the vortexes and rivulets of air affected by the small figure’s movements. Moments ago, she had decided to start walking, then she had made a conscious decision to change her mind. The moment she had stopped, the three figures had walked off ahead, the little girl marching her ridiculous strident steps. Her ghost. Or perhaps she was that Stephanie’s ghost. She felt oddly melancholic as she watched the shimmering apparition skipping and hopping towards a different future.
“I’m scared West.”
West bent over slightly and held her shoulders, “What are you scared of?”
“It’s us … everywhere.That’s what I’m seeing. It’s just us.”
West frowned, not sure that he understood what she meant by this, but still more concerned that he understood only too well.
Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams Page 32