All Seeing Eye

by Rob Thurman

  “Why did you do that to Fuji? He’s harmless.” The question broke into my thoughts and held exasperation, if not much surprise.

  “Because, Hector, he feels sorry for me being dragged into this by blackmail but has his nose up Thackery’s ass anyway. He doesn’t have a brother to free, like you. He does have a shred of conscience but no excuse for ignoring it. Besides, and this goes for all of you, if you’re going to benefit from what I can do, you should get to experience some of the downside. Although, trust me, hearing about it sure as hell isn’t the same as living it.” I gave Hector a sideways glance. “If I could give this gift to you and spend the rest of my life digging ditches, then maybe I would get a little God in my life, because it’d be a damn miracle.”

  “You might get part of your wish.” Hector folded his arms as he kept his eyes on the still water. “This is one of the few sites rumored to show a genuine ether recording of the event. People throughout the years claimed to have seen Brother Job at work, always as the sun sets.”

  “Yeah?” That had been when the baptisms took place. “Seeing it isn’t the same as feeling it, but I’ll cross my fingers and take what I can get.”

  In the very next moment, get it I did.

  And a lot more.

  I heard one of the soldiers, unarmed as they’d been at the mill, for all the good that had done, yell in shock and fear or a damn good imitation of both. He was standing on the high rock wall on the other side of the quarry, opposite where we stood seventy-five feet down on the narrow strip of gravel and red mud beach. I looked where he was pointing, to see a white blur under the water glowing with the fire of a descending sun. I crouched and put my one ungloved hand fisted around Charlie’s keys against the ground. The blur rose, and the body of a woman surfaced. Her arms were spread, hovering on the top of the water like the wings of a bird. Her hair was black, I knew, although I couldn’t see it. It was covered by a white scarf. A woman’s hair is the jewel of God. Let no man but her husband see it.

  “Rachel Adams. She was fifteen.” I knew I said it because I felt my lips move, but I didn’t hear the words. She drowned. Brother Job baptized his followers until their life and their sins fled their bodies. And if God deemed them worthy, he would return that life to them and send the sins to hell. Funny, no one proved quite good enough for God to step in. Job was mighty disappointed. Mighty disappointed, as he and his disciples held the men and women of the Trials under the quarry water. Even more disappointed when he himself held the head of his last disciple under and that man proved too sinful to return as well.

  Another body floated up, dark pants, white shirt, open eyes reflecting the bleeding rays of the sun.

  “Adam Jacobson. Nineteen years.”

  Then another.

  “Joseph Bevins. Eight.”

  Another.

  “Mary Bevins. Five.” She held a doll, a rag doll in a pink dress.

  There was more shouting, men who’d seen war horrified by the virtual photo of a long-dead little girl. Only an image out of death’s memory album revealed for a moment, and their brains short-circuited.

  Walk a mile in my shoes? They couldn’t walk even a second.

  “Mary Bevins. Five,” I repeated, my eyes fixed on the small spot of pink. “Lungs filling with water as she screamed for her mommy.”

  Pink doll. Pink shoe. A wide quarry or a narrow well, was there any difference?

  Mary Bevins. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, until Brother Job said nursery rhymes were the work of the devil. Mary, Mary, whose mommy was right there, her hand with Brother Job’s, holding her little girl under the water for God.

  Mary and Tess. Five years old, screaming to be saved, but no one listened.

  The pink patch bobbed in the water. It wasn’t the dress on a doll. It was a shoe, a pink shoe. Tessie’s shoe. The floating form wasn’t a little girl named Mary. It was my sister. It was Tess, and this time I wouldn’t be too late. I lunged into the water after her. I took two long steps and dove into the water. I was with Tess in seconds. I wrapped an arm around her to lift her up, lift her to the air, lift her to life.

  My arm passed through her. I tried again with both arms and the same result. I was there, right there, and again I couldn’t save her. Just as I couldn’t all those years ago.

  Another set of arms wrapped around me this time, the grip solid and unbreakable.

  “It’s not her, Jackson. It’s not Tess.”

  I was being yanked back through the water as I fought.

  “Shit, I’m a goddamn idiot,” Hector swore savagely at himself. “There was no way I shouldn’t have known this could happen.”

  Not Tess.

  It couldn’t be Tess.

  Tess was gone.

  I wasn’t reliving the life of Job. I was reliving my own.

  The dying rays of the sun shifted, and I saw my sister change into a girl with soaked brown curls and wide-open gray eyes before she disappeared, leaving only the waves I’d made in her wake. All of the bodies disappeared with her, and that’s when the yelling turned to screaming. And the screaming turned to gurgling and praises to God on high.

  “God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”

  It echoed over and over again from four different throats as the last ray of sun disappeared under a velvet purple bank of clouds.

  “God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”

  “God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”

  The echo of four became one wailed litany. “God accepts your soul and returns it to thee.”

  God hadn’t planned on returning those souls to anyone, but it was a little late for that warning.

  I spit water and said hoarsely, “Charlie.” I’d dropped his keys in the water, but I didn’t need a reading from them to know what the hell was happening. No one did. We had ten men: Hector, me, Thackery, Fuji, and six soldiers. Brother Job had his disciples to help him conduct the baptisms. Three soldiers were doing their best to drown the other three, and Fujiwara was up to his chest in the water, both arms beneath the surface to his shoulders, and Thackery was nowhere in sight.

  And right then, I began to wonder why only those who committed violence and not the victims had their personalities imprinted to be replayed when triggered by Charlie’s attempts to return. Thackery had said that violence frayed the ether. Why that and not fear and terror? Thanks to Boyd, I’d experienced all three, and fear and terror felt just as powerful as dealing out aggression. But I wasn’t an asshole with a giant brain and a degree in physics like Thackery, so I guessed I’d never know.

  “Jackson …”

  And maybe I should stop wondering and help save some people from following the fate of the cult of Job. I couldn’t save Tess. Tess wasn’t there. She was long gone, but I could save someone else.

  We were in the shallows of the water, and I shook Hector off. “I’m okay. I just … I’m okay now, all right?” I didn’t wait to see if he believed me or not. I went back into the water, heading for the nearest soldier holding his thrashing comrade under for the glory of God. Hector hadn’t come across with a Taser yet, but he had slipped me a nicely illegal pair of gloves before we’d left that morning. These did more than protect me from psychic images. They had lead weights sewn into the knuckles, and they gave a punch an extra snap—which I delivered to the back of the soldier’s neck.

  He went limp. I caught his shirt with my other bare hand—reading nothing of consequence—and kept him from sinking while his unwilling come-to-Jesus participant erupted out of the water, coughing and wheezing. He was still expelling quarry water, and his eyes suddenly took on a fanatical glow as he tackled me and the unconscious soldier. “God … accepts—” was all he managed to choke out before the three of us ended up buried in what could have been our unpleasantly wet grave.

  I fought my way back up into the air, dragging the guy with me with one hand and swinging the other in a fist. The blow took the other soldier directly under the chin as he surfaced. He prompt
ly toppled back under the water again, and soon I was pulling two dead-weight, but alive, goons out of the water to dump them on the shore.

  Hector was taking out the soldier who’d dived off the rock wall to play disciple. He choked him out the same as he had the man at the mill. “You have a hell of a punch,” he told me as he took his opponent out. “Why didn’t you try it on me?”

  “Because you were behind me, and you pour your breakfast milk over steroids instead of Cheerios.” And because I’d realized in time that he’d been pulling me away from an illusion in the water that wasn’t my sister and wasn’t my past. I moved to the next zealously chanting soldier surrounded by roiling water. Fuji was closer, but if he succeeded in drowning Thackery, I wasn’t going to be crying any tears. Thackery was most likely a murderer, and if he died at the hands of the echo of another murderer, that was poetic justice at its best.

  “I lift weights. I don’t take steroids.” He threw the soldier he had knocked out into the arms of the half-drowned one. “You have two couches. One for you and one for your dog. That doesn’t shout ‘exercise fiend.’ Hell, if you walked that dog a block, you’d both be winded.”

  It was strange to be snarking with someone while trying to keep a long-past massacre from taking lives in the here and now. Although not as strange as you’d think. It was a tough thing to do, face someone who’s screaming about God, temporarily insane, and trying to drown whoever he can get his hands on. I lived every day in other people’s pasts and secrets, and even I found this pretty damn creepy. A little sarcasm was a welcome distraction from the weirdness factor.

  As I handled the last soldier with another punch, putting my new glove through its paces, I retorted, “I run ten miles every day!” When it wasn’t too hot, and it was always too hot. “I’m a natural athlete!” Close enough. I did run and swim, but at the Y, where they had air-conditioning. I was built lean, and I was in shape enough to take care of myself. I hadn’t forgotten my teenage years and that someday I might need that skill again.

  “Ask your guys when they wake up if they don’t feel like they got a natural ass kicking. Cane Lake lessons stick with you. Even Charlie swung one helluva mean book bag,” I added, giving over the unconscious man to the one who came up out of the water. He coughed up water, caught his baptizer, and didn’t take over the role as the other soldier I saved had done. Hector’s hadn’t, either. That meant something.

  I looked up at the sky, twilight now, as if I could see Charlie and his book bag, but of course, I couldn’t. And without the lost keys, I couldn’t feel him, either. But there wouldn’t have been anything to feel, anyway. As the soldiers and Hector started to pry Fuji off a submerged Thackery, the small scientist’s eyes cleared from fanatical to frantic. Along with stuttered fervent apologies, that told me what I needed to know. Charlie was gone, as was the repeating, gibbering chorus that had been the mirror’s reflection of Job and his disciples.

  Thackery, unfortunately, was still here and alive—vomiting water and glaring at Fujiwara as if he’d throw him onto the nearest French Revolution cart headed to the guillotine. Fuji’s stuttered apologies went straight to plain incoherent stuttering. I couldn’t make out a single word. The other men, the baptizers and the baptized, recovered and slowly dried in a Georgia heat that the coming night wouldn’t begin to tame. Most of them sat with their heads in their hands. I didn’t know if it was from the sensation of a rerun of dead killers in their heads, almost being drowned by their brother soldiers, or the sight of Job’s victims back for a reunion tour.

  I should’ve been at least somewhat happy. I mean, welcome, guys, to just a small part of my world. Feel what I feel every damn day.

  I wasn’t happy, though. Six formerly tough-looking guys now seemed to want nothing more than to be anywhere but here. As far as I knew, they’d been in battle, seen friends die, but that living hell was something they were prepared for. What the sun had set on today had shown them a layer to this life that they knew nothing about and didn’t want to know anything about. And this had been a recording. If ghosts really had existed, who knew what knots would’ve been tied in their brains? Then again, the scientists had told them what to expect, I was guessing. Or at least, Hector would have—the possibility of the visual recording.

  Seeing that, knowing that it wasn’t ghosts, it wasn’t life after death, it was only a fluke of physics, it could be that some of them were less upset by what they’d seen and more shaken by a loss of some religious faith.

  One person, not surprisingly, wasn’t shaken at all. He was adjusting perfectly fine to visions of dead bodies and almost being drowned by his employee. Not only was he fine, but he had a theory. That gleam I’d noticed in his eye earlier was now the brilliant glint of a cold operating light bouncing from a surgeon’s scalpel. “It’s you, Eye. You and Hector combined, perhaps.” Thackery became caught up in coughing, but lungs sloshing with water couldn’t stop the bastard for long. It seemed nothing could. “You’re providing a focus for Charles. Considering our location”—he gestured at the water—“you could say you’re the next best thing to a scientific fishing lure.” He said it so smugly that I wished Fujiwara had more upper-body strength or Hector had been slower in pulling him off his boss.

  Hector studied Thackery with interest, not much hope, but he was listening. “How did you come to that conclusion?” His dark hair blended into the night, but his pale eyes were visible and challenging.

  “First, he’s your brother. That is one tie to this plane, blood or genetics. It doesn’t matter. Second, there’s Eye.” He addressed me without even waiting for me to bow and kiss his ring. He had to be in the midst of a scientific orgasm.

  He ran a hand over his light hair and shook the water from his fingers. “You say your psychic ability only lets you feel people when you touch an object that belonged to them. You touch Charles’s keys, and you can sense him trying to get through. I think Charles, changed as he is now—the fragment that is left of him—is feeling you as well. This is the second time Charles has shown up at your and Hector’s location, a location of lesser violence in comparison with the others available. A less likely location. Less ether-fraying. This could mean no more random guessing. No more aiming for what we think is the highest violence quotient. With the two of you and the machine at the next appearance at any location on the list, we could put an end to Charles once and for all.”

  “I know you meant ‘set him free,’ not the asshole thing you actually uttered,” I said flatly. I didn’t like the way Thackery talked about Charlie. I knew Hector had to like it even less. I didn’t believe we’d be setting Charlie free to a better place, but I did believe we could let him dissolve into nonexistence. That had to be better than what he was going through now.

  Lost.

  Everyone had to remember when they were little, and I mean really little, that being lost was the worst feeling in the world. Pure terror. I wouldn’t want to sentence anyone to an eternity of that, certainly not someone who’d once forced his friendship on me when I denied that I wanted it. I’d lied, and he’d known it. I owed Charlie, and I was committed to paying that debt.

  “I’ll stick with scientific terminology and ending what fragments of the failed experiment that was Charles and now happens to be killing people fit better than—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish his fancy scientific sentence before a fist hit his nose, which flattened in an explosion of blood.

  Thackery was knocked onto his back and was now coughing up both blood and water. Hector unballed his fist and said calmly, “See? No steroids, or I would’ve killed him instead of only breaking his nose.”

  “You know, Hector,” I commented, “you’re beginning to grow on me. Now, let me kick him in the ribs, and let’s call this fucked-up day over.”

  • • •

  I didn’t get to kick Thackery. Hector wouldn’t let me, which was pretty unfair, considering he’d given the man the nose of a twenty-year veteran prizefighter. We all ende
d up in the infirmary. Some for near drownings, some from being knocked unconscious with a blow from an illegal sap glove in the back of the neck or in the jaw, one with a broken nose, and one from good old-fashioned near hysteria.

  Hector hadn’t gotten hurt or swallowed any quarry water, but he hung around at Meleah’s order. She called it a request, but I knew an order when I heard one. He leaned against a wall, arms folded, bored with Thackery’s blood-bubbled threats of getting him thrown off the project. Fujiwara was the opposite. He had gone from babbling to silently shaking like a Chihuahua in a meat freezer. The natural nurturer Eden clucked over him, rubbed his back, and promised that Thackery would understand that he hadn’t tried to drown him on purpose … not his purpose, anyway. I thought they were going to have to give in finally and sedate the guy, but he eventually calmed down enough to wrap a blanket around himself and shuffle out of the infirmary to head back to his room.

  I was waiting in line for an X-ray. Meleah wouldn’t take my word that I hadn’t inhaled any fluid when I’d been struggling with the soldier underwater. Aside from Thackery’s fury and Eden’s reassurances, delivered personally to each patient in the room, no one was doing much talking. The soldiers were as pale and shadow-eyed as they’d been at the quarry. I remembered the feeling from long ago, when I first started seeing into the past: if you don’t talk about it, if you don’t think about it, it won’t be true.

  Too bad it didn’t work.

  Hector was either nursing a satisfaction over taking Thackery down or contemplating Thackery’s theory. As for me? I’d like to claim that what had happened at the quarry was the same old same old. Nothing new. I’d been in my natural environment, unfazed as a pig in shit. A good old Georgia psychic boy who went through this every day—minus the actual hands-on violence.