by Brenna Lyons
They were there—the tigers, circling around her. They crouched as if preparing to pounce, their shoulders bunching and their tails twitching like a cat playing with a mouse. Dianna swallowed painfully and backed toward the wall. The tigers advanced as she retreated, keeping their distance constant as their claws clicked on the tile floor.
Kyle’s story flashed through her mind. The tigers attacked Peter. They really did, didn’t they? The receiver dropped from her fingers, and she covered her face with her hands.
“It’s not real. He’s playing with me,” she chanted over and over again.
Finally, she dropped her hands and sobbed in relief. Gone. There was no one in the kitchen but herself. As her shaking subsided, her anger rose. Carol may hate it, but Kyle had to know the truth. Maybe if he knew the truth, he would reject Ty and this could end—she hoped. Ty had a way of getting what he wanted.
Dianna pushed off the wall and stormed up the stairs toward Kyle’s room. She’d wake him up from the damn nap he fell into after their talk if she had to. He could stop this. She was sure of it, and he would stop it. Dianna would do anything she could to make sure of it.
She glanced up at the open door to his room. The tigers were scattered around the floor. She hesitated for a moment then forged on with a growl of irritation. Toys. Just toys. Despite whatever slight of hand Ty was employing, they were just toys. She just had to remember that.
She glanced up again. They were lined up outside the doorway waiting for her. Dianna squared her shoulders and walked at them. “You’re not real,” she informed them. “I’ll walk right through you. You can’t hurt me.”
The tigers moved their shoulders in preparation to attack, and Dianna laughed lightly at the threat. As she reached the white tiger, the one Kyle thought of as Ty, his paw flashed out. A searing pain tore at her ankle, and she recoiled several yards. She looked at her leg in shock. Five welts burned an angry red through her pantyhose.
Ty’s voice assaulted her last remaining calm. “Remember your Master, Dionnysia. You will not balk me. Never forget that.”
She swung her head to look at him. The tiger’s mouth was drawn up in a cruel parody of a smile, revealing sharp, yellowed teeth dripping with thick saliva. His eyes were no longer glass. Rather, they were the cool blue she remembered, crinkled at the edges in amusement.
“It’s been too long, girl, but you always did have a tendency to do things I didn’t want you to do. You and that bastard of yours, both. This time you will do as I say.”
Dianna rubbed her hands over her eyes roughly and shook her head. She couldn’t give in to him this time. She paid the price either way, and the price for disobedience took far less toll on her. Push him away. He has no real power. He has no physical form. Not real. Not real. NOT REAL! “No,” she asserted and opened her eyes.
Gone. She laughed nervously.
She glanced down at her ankle, but the welts were still there. Dianna bit her lip and considered the possibilities. The tigers were stuffed toys. They had no fangs and no claws. It was a mind trick. She should be able to overcome it by self-control. But how?
She glanced at the tigers scattered around on Kyle’s floor, back where they were because they never actually moved. Mind games. She waited too long to banish them last time. She walked into the illusion instead of sending it away and walking through nothing. A talisman. If she carried a reminder that they weren’t alive with her, it would be easier to banish them.
Without another thought, she rushed to the room and snatched up the closest tiger before retreating to the kitchen. The fact that she was so close to her goal and was playing this game instead struck Dianna as absurdly funny. She was going insane.
Her hysterical laughter choked off. What if she was crazy? On some level, the concept was appealing, preferable even to what she believed was true. Thorazine and a nice padded cell won hands down against Ty having his hand on her throat and in her mind.
“Okay,” she reasoned, “how do I tell the difference?”
She finally decided that sanity or insanity made no difference if she couldn’t control her mind long enough to make a difference in the overall situation. She had to have her talisman, her constant proof that the tigers were nothing more than stuffed toys.
Dianna went to the counter and laid the tiger down. Information about it assaulted her mind. Tigg was a male Chinese Tiger, the rarest tiger that was not already extinct. He and his sister, Riggs, had been gifts to Kyle on his third birthday.
She shook her head. “It’s a damn toy with a fictional life story. I’m not killing a rare tiger. I’m taking the seam out of toy,” she rationalized.
Still, her hands shook. “It’s a toy,” Dianna assured herself. She cringed as she plunged the serrated blade into it and sighed in relief as nothing happened. Of course, nothing happened. It’s a toy, after all. She started pulling the knife out and down, splitting the belly-seam neatly.
Kyle’s scream split through the silence of the house, and Dianna nicked her finger with the blade. The scream was tortured but short lived and reminiscent of Katie’s late teenage years. She shuddered at the similarity and looked down at the cut on her hand.
Blood. There was blood everywhere, and it wasn’t her own. It poured from the wound in the tiger’s chest cavity. She could see its heart beating rapidly behind the exposed ribcage and above the coils of intestines spilling out from the gaping incision. His chest heaved spasmodically.
“He’s bleeding to death,” she cried out frantically. Dianna reached for the injured beast, but he struck out in pain and fear. New welts appeared on her hand, but she was too far gone to feel them.
Dianna grabbed the dishtowel and tried to staunch the seemingly endless flow of blood, but it ran over the edge of the countertop and splashed in warm droplets over her feet while she worked. Finally, Tigg drew a shuddering breath and was still. Dianna wept as she covered the tiger with the red-stained cloth.
But—the cloth wasn’t blood-soaked. The beige countertop was clean. With shaking hands, she uncovered Tigg’s body. A toy. Cotton batting poked from the split seam, and the only blood was a single smudge of her own on the soft, orange felt.
Ty’s laughter echoed in her ears. “You should have heeded my warning, Dionnysia. It’s too late for you now.”
Her mind seemed incapable of separating the dream from reality. What was real? Was the blood real? Were the welts on her hand and ankle? Was the laughter? Was the pain in her shoulder radiating through her chest real? Was Kyle real, standing over her where she had collapsed to the floor with Tigg cradled in his arms and a sad look on his face while her eyes fluttered closed?
* * *
Carol grumbled her way up the city steps from the bridge. It was nice of her mother to offer to watch Kyle, but the busy phone all afternoon ranked somewhere between worrisome and annoying. She stopped short of panic. Carol convinced herself that there was no need for panic. Kyle simply had a phone off the hook somewhere and her mother hadn’t realized it. There could be no other explanation—she hoped.
When she saw Kyle eating Oreos in front of his Buzz Lightyear tape, she shook her head in amusement. “I should have known,” she mused. “Spoiling the child has always been a grandmother’s prerogative.”
Carol looked at his hands in distaste. “Kyle, your hands are black. How many cookies have you had?” She scooped up the bag of Oreos and found it three-quarters empty. It had been full that morning. “Your grandmother better have helped a lot,” she grumbled. She looked at her son in concern. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen since she walked in. “Kyle?”
He didn’t answer. She crossed in front of him. His eyes were still focused on the TV, through her instead of at her. He wasn’t tharn on the set. He was non-responsive again.
She bent down to his level. “Kyle?” she called tentatively. Carol took one of his hands and examined it closer. The cookies didn’t cause the discoloration. It was dirt, the same dirt that was ground into the knees of his
jeans and the toes of his tennis shoes.
She was on her feet abruptly. “Mom.”
There was no answer.
Concern solidified into fear, and Carol started searching room to room, calling for her mother. She stopped cold in the kitchen doorway. The vacant stare and milky complexion could only mean one thing, so the fact that her mother’s skin was ice cold and still beneath her shaking fingers barely penetrated the numb chill in Carol’s soul.
She stood slowly and reeled in the receiver. Carol laid her hand over the button to close the connection and dialed 911 when she had a dial tone again. She answered the dispatcher’s questions in a daze and hung up with no clear idea of what she told them. Then, she managed to find Dr. Carter’s phone number and spoke to his secretary before returning to the couch and watching her son with her arms crossed over her waist.
The police arrived first, and Mac wasn’t far behind the patrolmen. He leaned close to her and asked if she was all right. Carol laughed nervously and started crying and rocking, unable to form more of a response than that.
“Have you contacted Katheryn?” he asked.
“No,” she managed. “She’s on the road. I can’t reach her until she shows up tonight—unless I page her. You don’t want her driving like that, Mac.”
“Are you sure?”
Carol nodded miserably.
“Will she come here?”
“No. She’s going to Mom’s place for the night.”
“Oh hell,” he grumbled. “Okay, I’ll take care of it. You take care of Kyle and yourself.”
She nodded as he moved away.
The paramedics came next, strapping Kyle to a stretcher that looked far too big for him.
As they were preparing to leave, Mac tried to talk to her again. “Carol, do you have any idea what Kyle was digging?” he asked quietly.
“No. Why?”
“Never mind. When he comes to, ask him for me. It may be important.”
“It was a heart attack, wasn’t it, Mac?” Carol asked nervously.
She didn’t miss the hesitation or the way his eyes shifted away. “We’ll check it out, Carol,” he replied quietly.
Things moved quickly at the hospital. She pushed away the doctors who seemed intent on ministering to her and growled at them to take care of her son. Dr. Carter breezed in and out of the exam room several times. An EEG showed high activity throughout the sensory and thinking areas of the brain, but Kyle remained unresponsive to the specific stimuli assaulting him. The MRI was arranged, and Dr. Mitchell came in to consult after it was over.
“Okay, Kyle is sleeping now, normal sleep patterns,” he assured her.
“What was going on in there?” Dr. Carter demanded.
Dr. Mitchell shrugged. “It was incredible to watch on the screens. The patterns were shifting over time. His mind would react as if he was watching and listening to something, though there was really nothing for him to see and hear. Then, the pattern would change. He’d be thinking. Memory was involved very little, almost not at all. It looked— It almost looked like he was having an interactive discussion or examination of something, taking turns with receptive input and forming a response? I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. I could write a book on what I was seeing if I had any clue what it meant.” He shrugged again. “I just hope he can remember, but that seems unlikely considering the almost complete shutdown of memory.”
“What could cause this?” Carol demanded. “Hypothetically.”
“If there was damage—But there’s not. There’s no damage. There are no tumors. Psychosis would involve the memory and thinking centers. But the sensory input? A hallucination? But from what? Even his blood chemistry isn’t far off. His sugar is a little low, but—”
“Low? He ate almost a whole bag of cookies. Unless—” Her mind was working overtime. What if he was eating cookies to replenish his sugar? What if whatever was happening caused the drop? “I have a hypothetical or two. Could what you’re seeing on the MRI be linked to telepathy or some other psychic phenomenon—out of body, maybe? And, could such an endeavor cause his blood sugar to drop?”
Both doctors looked at her in shock.
“Could it?” she demanded.
Dr. Mitchell sighed. “I’m not sure. I’m sure someone somewhere has conducted testing in that area, but it’s hardly mainstream. I don’t even know who to ask. I guess I could put out some feelers. Is there a reason you asked?”
Carol felt her cheeks burn. “Well, Keith played a little game of Go Fish with Kyle that yielded unexpected results.”
“What kind of results?” Carter asked.
“He didn’t tell me precisely, but I know Kyle was telling him what cards he was holding up, but it was linked to the tigers somehow.” She shrugged.
“Well, why didn’t anyone tell me?” he demanded.
Keith answered from the doorway. “Because I’m not exactly sure what he’s doing or how he’s doing it yet. Not to mention, I didn’t exactly do a clinical study. I couldn’t go to you with a wild, unproven conjecture like that. You’d think I was nuts.” He came into Mitchell’s office and swung the door shut again. Keith sat in an open chair facing the other two doctors. “Hi, Carol. How’s it going?”
“Hi, Keith. He’s asleep now. What took you so long?”
“No one called me. My first clue was the police cruiser outside your house.”
“Ahhh. I see.”
Mitchell interrupted. “Back to the subject at hand. What did you see, Keith?”
He shrugged. “He could tell me what card I was holding up.”
“By color?”
“No. As near as I can figure, he saw them in black and white. He matched the letters on the bottom of the card. He couldn’t tell me until the letters were uncovered.”
Carter looked at Carol in confusion. “Is Kyle colorblind? Can he see any colors?”
“Of course he can,” she shot back. “He knows all the primary and secondaries, black, white, gray, pink—all of them by sight.”
“But tigers are colorblind,” Keith added.
“What difference does that make?” Carter asked.
“Whatever he’s doing, he has it tied to the tigers. Maybe it’s a mental block of some sort. I’m not sure. At any rate, he told me that the tiger behind me was telling him what she was seeing. Since tigers can’t see color—” He shrugged again.
“And you believe this?” Mitchell asked.
“Three for three, buddy. But, he didn’t want to repeat it. He got very defensive after the first time. I had to trick him into doing it.”
“So, he wouldn’t be a willing subject?” Carter surmised.
“I’d guess not,” Keith agreed.
“Okay, for argument’s sake— Kyle is seeing things he shouldn’t be able to see. Is he afraid to tell us? Is he repressing it? Or, is he somehow not storing the stimuli and has nothing to remember?”
“No idea,” Keith intoned. “I might not be able to prove what I’ve already seen let alone anything else.”
“You’re still head and shoulders above my success rate. Have you considered—”
“No. I don’t think Kyle would accept me as anything but Uncle Keith, but it’s more than that. I can’t be clinical and uninvolved here. It breaks all the rules.”
Carter nodded grimly. “As much as I hate to admit it, I’m getting nowhere. He’s like a locked vault around me. To get to him, it might take an uncle rather than a doctor.”
“It’s a bad idea,” Keith protested.
“I know it is, but it may be the best idea we can come up with.”
“Give it another week or two,” he countered.
“If you insist, but I don’t think it’s going to make any difference.”
* * *
Katheryn parked the truck around the corner from her mother’s house, double-checked the lock on the rolling door, and decided unloading the MDX could wait until morning. She was beat, drained. No one was answering at Carol’s, but w
hatever was troubling Kyle made him sad. It didn’t hurt or frighten him, so she decided it could wait as well.
She had been living on Coke or Jolt for the entire trip, but the constant drain of Kyle on her system drove her to refuel on carbs fairly often. The ten-hour drive stretched to thirteen and her arrival time from a comfortable ten to a grueling one o’clock. Now that the assault had ended, she could recharge with sleep, if she could get any.
She noted that Dianna’s car wasn’t parked on the block, but the lights were on. It was probably in the shop, she rationalized. In a city like Pittsburgh, with all of the available public transportation, a car was a luxury and hardly a necessity.
Katheryn fished in her front pocket for her key and settled her backpack further onto her shoulder. She turned the knob and pushed the door open with her knee. “Mom. Mom, I’m here,” she called out as she made her way through the living room and past the office to the kitchen. “Have you talked to Carol today?”
She stopped in the doorway and stared in disbelief at the sight of Mac sitting at the table. He had a hand wrapped around his coffee cup, and his face was set in a pained expression.
“Hello, Katheryn,” he greeted her quietly.
The keys dropped from her boneless fingers and she shook her head in adamant refusal. It wasn’t possible. Her mother was at the hospital, right? She scooped the keys back up and headed for the door, fumbling for the key to her SUV. The hand on her shoulder made her shudder in restraint. She wouldn’t look. Mac’s mind was off-limits.
“Which hospital is she in, Mac? I should go.”
“Katheryn, she’s not in the hospital. I’m sorry. It looks like it was a heart attack. There was nothing that could be done,” he replied gently.
Mac tried to pull her back toward the kitchen, but she wrenched her shoulder out of his grasp and made a beeline for her father’s chair. Katheryn folded into the soft leather and let it envelop her as Dad used to envelop her in his arms after a nightmare.