by Chris Dolley
Brenda’s day went downhill from there. She couldn’t go out in case Brian called, and if she stayed in, there was a good chance that in three hours’ time Susan would be hammering on the door. And, knowing Susan, she wouldn’t go away. She’d peer in every window and camp out on the lawn.
Brenda carried her TV and computer upstairs. She’d lock all the doors and hide in her bedroom. And draw her curtains in case Susan got hold of a ladder from somewhere.
By the afternoon she was just starting to calm down.
Then the rhino arrived.
Brenda was too shocked to scream. It was a small rhino – barely eighteen inches long – with white horns, jet-black eyebrows and furry grey skin. For one second she thought it was a ghost. Dead people were bad enough, but dead cuddly toys...
Did Chucky have a pet?
Then it spoke.
“Quick,” said Brian. “Fetch me a map. They’ve found Daddy.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Brenda logged into Google maps. Half of her was rushing to find Daddy’s location. The other half wanted to know why Brian had appeared as a rhino.
“I was just showing off,” said Brian, back in human form and stretching his shoulders. “And demonstrating the considerable lengths I had to go through to hide in the lead detective’s office. I saw his Rochester Rhino mascot on his desk and it was either that or swap places with a picture on the wall.”
Brenda brought up the map and centered it on Syracuse. “Are you sure it’s really Daddy?”
Brian shrugged. “We’ll only know when we get there. But the police are confident. They’ve got two independent witnesses – a postman and a storekeeper. Both describe him as polite and quiet. Someone who keeps to himself, never initiates conversation, and lives alone on the edge of the Adirondacks.”
According to both witnesses his name was Andrius Luksa. He had no criminal record and, from what the police could find, no driving license, or employment record, either. At least under the name of Andrius Luksa. They were still checking.
“It’s north east of Rome,” said Brian, pointing at the screen. “Around Scratch Hollow ... at the end of Forester Road. There! Now zoom in.”
She zoomed to the highest magnification possible. There was a single house at the end of long winding road. Isolated, surrounded by trees. The nearest neighbor was a half-mile away. Nothing but forest and what looked like brown scrub for miles in all other directions.
“What do we do next?” she asked.
“I’ll send my inner eye off to have a look around. We’ll take it from there.”
o0o
He took one last look at the map, then sent his eyes racing back to Syracuse. From there he took the I-90 east, slowing when he came to road signs, following the signs first for Rome, then heading north east and gaining height, rising to cloud level and looking down, trying to match the landscape below to the image he’d seen on the computer. Then dropping fast, aiming at what he was sure was Scratch Hollow, and veering north and east to the small road heading into the forest.
Now he was at head height, flying along the road, invisible and silent. Trees and scrub and rocky outcrops all around. A few houses. A few distant views of mountains and lakes. Almost there. The road bending and twisting, the trees encroaching closer and closer.
And then the road stopped. There was a small clapboard and shingle cabin in a clearing off to the right. Brian slowed, dropping to a few inches above ground height. He could see a garage and a shed, but no sign of Daddy. There was no car in the drive and the cabin door and windows were closed.
Was Daddy elsewhere? Were the girls in the cellar alone? And where would the cellar be? Under the house? The garage? Buried in the grounds?
He rose and circled the property, looking for signs of trap doors, wishing his inner eye could switch to infrared so he could pick up signs of life. Then he moved towards the house.
And hesitated. He wasn’t sure what Daddy was. Or what powers he had. From the initial police inquiries, he didn’t appear to be a plastic surgeon. Which meant either there was an incredibly large number of Mary Alice lookalikes on the planet ... or Andrius Luksa could shapeshift people.
And if he could do that, what else could he do? Would he be able to see Brian’s inner eye?
Brian decided to play it cautiously. He knew Sacrifice had probably been kept underground so he’d check the buildings for cellars. He’d avoid the rooms above ground altogether and slip straight in through the base of the external walls.
He circled the cabin. There were no obvious signs of a basement. No door, no window wells. The clapboard stopped a foot above ground level. Below that was what looked like a concrete footing.
Brian aimed at the footing, angled down and slipped through. Everything went black. He edged further forward, not sure if he was in a sealed light-free basement, or travelling through bedrock. He kept going – slowly – trying to suck in as much light as he could, straining to see ... something, anything, a shape, a variation in the all-encompassing blackness.
He bobbed upwards, hoping that he still had an idea where ‘up’ was. Light almost blinded him as his eye emerged from a carpet. He was in a sparsely furnished room, light streaming in through the windows. Simple wooden furniture, shabby carpet. No sign of Daddy. Not that he stayed long enough to look. He flew across the floor, keeping low, then ducked back down through the floorboards. This time he found something. It was dark, but not pitch black. There was a thin strip of light coming from what could be the base of a door away and down to his left. He moved towards it. Now he could make out steps running along a wall to his right. No light came from the top. Whatever door or opening led to the house above, it was well sealed.
Brian circled the cellar room. It was larger than he thought. There was some kind of cupboard against one wall. And just the one door. Unless it led to a warren of cells spreading out from under the cabin, it didn’t look like Daddy had room to keep more than one girl.
Brian paused in front of the strip of light at the bottom of the door in the cellar. Who would be on the other side? A hostage on her own, or would Daddy be with her? He had no way of telling. He couldn’t listen at the door. He couldn’t knock. He couldn’t whisper through the crack.
All he could do was pass through the door and look.
He floated towards the door, gently sliding into the wood, slowing as he did so, not wanting to protrude into the room a millimeter more than he had to. And getting ready to flee, to spiral up and into the clouds the moment anything untoward occurred.
Light. Bright and sharp. He could see the entire room. A ten-by-twelve carpeted cell with a bed, chair, small table, chest of drawers, sink, toilet and shower. And Sacrifice. She was standing by the table, looking like a teenager plucked straight out of the sixties – long flowing cheesecloth dress, hair cascading down to the small of her back. She could have been abducted from Woodstock. She had to be at least seventeen. Which was strange. Mary Alice Cassini, Ashley Peterson, Lauren Stone, all the Sacrifices Brenda had summoned – they’d all been much younger. Prepubescent most of them. Whereas this girl was a young woman. She might even be eighteen or nineteen.
Was he changing his MO?
And should Brian act now? He could materialize in a matter of seconds, open a path between here and Brenda’s bedroom, grab Sacrifice and whisk her back to safety. It was the sensible thing to do. He could then assume Sacrifice’s shape, teleport back and take her place. Maybe turn the tables on Daddy? See how powerful the man really was, and extract a little retribution before the police arrived.
That was what had Brian intended. But he never got the chance. The girl suddenly turned, looked towards him, and everything went pink.
He tried to pull back, but experienced no sense of moving. Everything around him was pink static – random patterns that made no sense. He thought up, he thought down, he thought home. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. He tried to snap back inside his head. He tried to propel himself forward, to pull
away, to duck and dive. Nothing!
Was he trapped? Blind? Had his inner eye been destroyed?
o0o
Brian’s head jerked suddenly. His eyes widened in panic. He started shaking his head wildly.
“What’s happened?” asked Brenda. She’d been biting her tongue for the past two minutes, watching Brian sitting on her bed doing his spaced out Stevie Wonder impersonation.
“I can’t see,” he said, panic in his voice, waving his head around like a demented child. “I can’t move my eyes. I’m ... I think I’m blind.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Daddy do that to you?”
Brenda’s eyes darted around the room, looking for Daddy. If he could blind Brian could he follow him home?
“No,” said Brian. “It was Sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?”
“What do my eyes look like?” He turned his face towards her, leaned forward and opened both eyes wide. “Do they look normal?”
“They look fine.”
“Are you sure? Look closer.”
She looked closer. His eyes looked perfectly normal, perhaps a touch bloodshot.
“Can’t you grow a new pair?” she asked.
His eyes morphed in front of her. She grimaced, fighting the urge to look away as his eyeballs turned bright white before growing a new pair of brilliant blue irises.
Brian’s turn to grimace. “I still can’t see. Shit!”
“You said Sacrifice did this?”
“What? Yes, she looked at me and – zap – everything went pink. And another thing. How old would Mary Alice be if she were alive today?”
Brenda did the math. The girl had been four when she’d been abducted thirteen years ago. “Seventeen. Why?”
“The Sacrifice in the cell is seventeen. And a dead ringer for Mary Alice.”
Brenda’s turn to invoke the expletive from Planet Brown.
“Did she ever strike you as odd when you talked to her?” asked Brian.
“She was a ghost,” said Brenda. “They’re all odd.”
Brenda considered this. Were the Sacrifices odder than most? Besides having untamed hair like the girl from The Ring, Brenda didn’t think so. The oldest Sacrifice had a strange calm about her, but at the time Brenda had put that down to brainwashing.
But If Mary Alice was still alive...
“How can Mary Alice be still alive? I talked to her ghost.”
“Are you sure it was a ghost?”
Crap. Brenda was no longer sure about anything. She had no idea how or why she saw whatever it was she saw. Maybe none of them were ghosts. Maybe they were all delusions. Maybe she was being manipulated by demons.
“And maybe someone was setting a trap,” said Brian. “Using you to get to me?”
“Who? Do you have any enemies?”
He gave her a look. “You’ve seen what I do. I create a new enemy every week.”
“But how many can steal eyes?”
He put his head in his hands. Brenda had never seen him like this. Even when he’d been chargrilled black and shot through with holes, he’d still exuded a crazy optimism. But now...
His head suddenly shot up. “What if it wasn’t a trap? If she wanted to blind me, there are a hundred and one easier ways to do it. She could have given you the cabin’s location the first time she came to you. Why the wait? Why all the different Sacrifices with different ages? Why make it so hard to find her?”
“Could your blinding have been an accident?” suggested Brenda. “She panicked and lashed out? After all, how could she know it was you? Aren’t you kind of invisible? She might have sensed someone watching her and thought it was Daddy.”
He shrugged, eyes downcast, staring blindly at the bed. “I have no idea. I have no idea about any of this. None of it makes sense.”
None of it had made sense to Brenda for quite a while. Was Sacrifice one person or several? Dead or alive? Was Daddy her abductor, or her accomplice? He might even be human. They’d only pegged him for a demon because he had to be a shapeshifter to make all the Sacrifices look the same. But if there was only one Sacrifice, then he didn’t need to be a shapeshifter.
“He could even be one of the good guys,” interjected Brian.
“What?”
“He could be Sacrifice’s jailer. A government agent tasked to look after criminals with superpowers. People who can’t be contained in ordinary prisons.”
Brenda was incredulous. “He’s a killer, Brian. It wasn’t only Sacrifice who identified him. Lauren did, too. He killed two little girls thirteen years ago.”
“If you can trust what Lauren said. What if she were Sacrifice too? What if Sacrifice is a shapeshifting ghost?”
Brenda threw her hands in the air. “Next you’ll be saying that I’m in it with Sacrifice, too. The whole world’s conspiring against you.”
Brian smiled sheepishly. “It might be.”
Brenda rolled her eyes. “And even if Sacrifice is the prisoner of some super secret government agency, it doesn’t mean she’s bad. She could be like you. Someone with superpowers, except she got caught. Then, somehow, she found out about us and managed to send some kind of spirit message to us–”
Brian interrupted. “Why the different ages? Why not come right out with it and ask for help?”
“I don’t know! Maybe she wasn’t sure if we’d help? But it explains everything else. She doesn’t know where she is, so she can’t tell us. And the reason you lost your eye wasn’t because of Sacrifice, but because you triggered some magical ward the government threw around the cell to keep her in and people like you out.”
“So how come I wasn’t zapped until she noticed me?”
“Because,” said Brenda, pausing while she struggled to find something cogent to say next. “Because she heard the alarm as the mechanism was triggered and turned towards the door to see what was happening.”
Brenda smiled smugly. Not bad for a speculative punt.
Brian appeared to agree, his head nodding slowly. “And my ears were here. The only sense I had in that cell was sight.”
Then he shook his head and sprang to his feet. “This is getting us nowhere. The only thing we know for certain is that in less than an hour the police are going to storm that cabin and we haven’t a clue who the bad guys are, or how dangerous they might be. There might be a blood bath. We might be the cause of a dangerous supervillain being freed.”
Brenda was sure she knew what he was going to say next. That the pair of them had to rush off to the cabin and save the world.
She was wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He was changing in front of her eyes. His ears growing tall and pointy, flaps appearing on his cheeks, his nose pushing out like a dog’s, his neck thickening.
“There’s more than one way to see.” His voice had changed. It was higher and distorted. “Bats can see by sonar. Dogs by smell. If I can see again we’ll have a chance.”
Brenda watched, stunned. He’d parted his lips. Maybe he was emitting high frequency sounds. His head tracked jerkily from left to right and then up and back. He sniffed the air.
“It’s just a matter of getting the frequency right and training my brain.”
“Are you ... getting anything?” Brenda asked.
“Only this strange desire to find a lamp-post and catch flies.”
There was silence for a while, then the corners of Brian’s mouth began to rise and Brenda lost it – laughing uncontrollably. Brian joined in. It was the first time she’d seen him so much as smile since losing his sight.
“Seriously,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Is it any good?”
He didn’t answer. He held both hands out in front of him and started to walk. His head jerking in what appeared to be a random mechanical fashion.
“The door’s over there,” he said, pointing – correctly – towards the bedroom door. He spun on his heel, made a
few tentative steps towards the window. “I can sense where the furniture is, but ... I have no fine tuning. I can’t discriminate between a chest of drawers and a dresser. Or a box for that matter. They’re all meaningless shapes. I can smell you, though.”
Thank you very much, thought Brenda. Just the kind of thing a girl not wearing perfume appreciates.
“It’s no good,” he said, ditching his black nose and bat ears and morphing back to Brian. “You’re going to have to be my eyes. Take my hand. You’re going to fly us to the Adirondacks.”
Brenda was hit by two competing waves of emotion. Excitement from the right. She was going to fly! Be in charge of a real life teleportation! And trepidation from the left. She was going to fly? How?
“We’ll take it slow to start.” He beckoned her with his hand. “Come on. Do you see a spare Labrador in the bedroom? I need my seeing eye Brenda.”
The first wave of trepidation may have broken, but two others were gathering on the horizon. Brenda wasn’t going anywhere without a plan or a map.
“I can’t memorize the way there. It’s over 500 miles across country.”
“We can follow the roads. Log on to your computer and print off an itinerary.”
That solved one problem, but not the other. What were they going to do when they got there? Being a seeing eye Brenda was fine in a teleportation bubble. Fun even. But, once they materialized, how would it work?
“You’re not turning me into a dog!”
“Brenda, we don’t have time for this. The police are probably half way there by now and they have a 450-mile head start.”
He was so annoying when he was right. But he was also wrong, too. Stumbling into a dangerous situation without a plan was crazy. Lives were at stake.
“We’ll think one up on the way down. Now, come on!”
He grabbed her. One of the plaster cornices on her bedroom ceiling warped and buckled alarmingly before sucking her up from the floor. They were teleporting blind.