Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2)

by Chad Huskins

  Like Mom with her job applications, she thought. The stragglers wait and wait, hoping that someone will call them over for an interview, and, if they answer all the questions exactly right, if they give off the right vibe, their applications will be accepted and they’ll have a group to protect them. The waves of emotions poured out of all of these groups; the hope of acceptance, the fear of rejection. Pathetic.

  Kaley had no room to speak, though. She belonged to this latter group, and not by choice. Well, perhaps partly by choice. She certainly hadn’t done herself any favors by going the quiet route. She kept her head down for the most part, and on the days she wore a hoodie she always pulled the hood up over her head to avoid eye contact with anybody. Today, though, she had no hoodie, yet still she cast her head down at the floor, at the cracked brick tiles that led up to the doors, across from which someone had hung posters with school spirit, things like ’CANES GONNA TRAMPLE THE COLONELS THIS WEEKEND! Kaley had come to the party too late to care about the Cartersville Purple Hurricanes and their never-ending struggle against the Cassville Colonels.

  Kaley stepped through the front door, and as she did she also stepped inside the lodge, following in Spencer’s wake. The monster was moving about the house with vehement purpose. He’d already fired a couple of shots at the door’s locks, but once the wood had splintered away he’d found a tougher frame underneath the wood veneer, one made of steel. “Fucker knew how to keep his little toys in the toy box,” he muttered as he set about looking for tools. Kaley followed him.

  Through the doors of her school and into its surprisingly opulent atrium, she paused to gather herself. There was water around her feet, a foamy sludge that no one else could see. The same as in her dream. To her left was a girl wearing a black skirt and neon pink stockings. She carried a black purse that had tiny fake skulls stitched alongside tiny chains holding My Little Pony figures. The sludge was foaming around the ankles of those neon pink stockings…She has no idea.

  Kaley looked to her right. A pair of girls were texting back and forth, either with each other or someone else. Kaley stared at them, and one of the girls caught Kaley staring and gave her the stink eye. The water was flowing down the stairs with great purpose, foaming and swirling, yet it had a trickling speed. Like a happy little brook, she noted.

  She stared at it all quite dumbly, unable to form a coherent opinion about any of it.

  “She’s here,” someone whispered. That familiar voice again. “She’s somewhere close by, I can feel it.” It was him, the one conducting the Others, the one organizing their search. Kaley didn’t know what they wanted but she intuitively knew that the longer she remained in this state, somehow in two places at once, the easier it would be for them to find her.

  “Yes…yes, she’s close by, close by!” it hissed. Those whispers carried down the halls of her school, echoed up from the basement in the lodge, and carried well out into the blizzard. Indeed, the whispers found a mode of transportation on those winds, and were soon carried away. But Kaley knew they would return. They had nothing else to do but search for her, and wait for an opportunity. Whoever they were, whatever they were trying to escape from, they only needed to wait. An’ they have the patience of Job from the Bible, chil’. That was Nan again, her words returning to Kaley through some similar corridor as the Others, perhaps half imagined, half remembered from a conversation long ago. Evil is persistent. It’s got nowhere else to go, nothin’ else to do. Nothin’ but sit, an’ wait to come back. S’why we got to be vigilant, ya hear?

  Spencer was rummaging around in the various drawers in the bedroom down the hall. She walked over to the door, paused, and looked at him. He was grumbling frustratedly under his breath. “What are you looking for?” she asked. He didn’t respond, just kept rummaging. He tossed a bunch of underwear out of a drawer, some long johns, a wooden box that clattered to the floor and spilled out some fancy silver spoons, a Rubix cube, and then—

  “Shoelaces,” he said, unraveling a long red strand of them. Spencer smiled, pocketed them.

  “You’re looking for shoelaces?”

  “No, but those are handy things sometimes.”

  “For what?” Spencer didn’t answer her. Now he moved across the hall to the bathroom. “So, what are you looking for?” she repeated, following him.

  “Somethin’ to pick the fuckin’ lock with,” he growled.

  “Don’t you have—”

  Someone bumped into her from behind, jarring her. It was the Mondo Bitches. Nancy paused, looked at her. It was her shoulder that had not-so-accidentally smacked up against her. “Oops!” she laughed. “Sorry, Kaley, I thought I smelled your sister, got me all off-balance.” Laquanda snickered. Laquanda was a head taller, but she was skinny and just a little awkward, and Kaley sensed immense insecurity inside her concnering her long face, which a couple of boys had said resembled a horse’s. Laquanda followed Nancy closely, out of what Kaley sensed was a need to be near someone who could supply her with things she couldn’t otherwise get, namely clothes and friends. Nancy was prettier, richer, had more things than the other girls and sometimes gave away her old phones whenever her parents bought her a new one, and shared alcohol from her parents’ secret stash on the weekends. It bought her friends that weren’t really friends.

  “You need to stop talking about my sister like that.”

  “What?” said Spencer, stepping out of the bathroom and passing right through her. The foaming water was all around him too, trickling down the walls and pooling at his feet, only he didn’t see or hear it. In his hands, he had a pair of what looked like hairpins, and a paperclip. “You say somethin’?” He knelt in front of the hallway door, slipped the paperclip into the bottom lock.

  “Excuse me?” said Laquanda. “Who the fuck you think you is, lil’ skank?”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” she said.

  “Then who were you talking to?” The question echoed simultaneously between Laquanda and Spencer.

  Kaley was suddenly dizzy from the overlap. She didn’t know why, but it caused a severe and powerful cognitive dissonance, one that made both worlds lurch for an instant. She blinked, tried to clear her foggy mind. “Never…never mind,” she said.

  Spencer grunted. Back at school, Nancy pinched Laquanda on the shoulder and said, “C’mon. To hell with this stinky bitch.” She pronounced it more like stanky.

  The school bell rang. It was the first bell, the three-minute warning. That put the time at exactly 7:57 AM.

  Nancy and Laquanda retreated into the hastening throng of students that were being funneled through this same artery. With a dull, distant look, Kaley watched Laquanda give her the finger as she and Nancy stepped through the swirling pools of foaming water. Back in the log cabin, she was staring equally dully at Spencer.

  Shannon’s “laughing man” had many skills, many of them Kaley had gotten a brief glimpse of during her time in that basement with Dmitry, Olga, and the others. His skills at lock-picking were something she’d actually used before, by peeking into his mind, by the maniac’s own invitation. One might even say she was forced inside of him. Even now, she could feel a sliver of that connection, feeling the sensitivity in his fingers transmitted to her own. She felt the vibrations of every tumbler pin in that lock, and felt every nudge that Spencer gave to those tumbler pins with his makeshift rake and torsion wrench, as if she were making those nudges and decisions herself.

  Maybe I am.

  Kaley’s powers—if they were indeed her powers—were vast beyond her own reckoning. There were so many avenues unexplored, so many parts of it she didn’t understand. The best she had figured it, she was touched by an uncanny connection to the barriers between this world and some other. She hesitated to call it Hell, but she’d done some reading on it in an attempt to come to some understanding, to give it all a word. Words helped the mind gain a grip.

  Over the last few months, Kaley had searched for books on the topic. There were the usual books by a bunch of kooks cl
aiming to make contact with the spirit world, but everything they mentioned didn’t sound even remotely like what she was going through. A bunch of books on heaven and hell, near-death experiences, even parallel dimensions. But the one that helped her come to terms most, and gave her words to perhaps understand a little more, came from Carl Sagan.

  Spencer had said Sagan’s name to her on that fateful night. He had made some quote to her about how if you wanted to make an apple pie from scratch, you first had to create the universe. A Google search had brought his name up, and she’d found videos of Sagan on YouTube. One in particular discussed how human beings exist in a three-dimensional world, and how they, as animals, developed to understand that world in those three dimensions. But Sagan hypothesized what it might be like to discover that there was a fourth dimension, and how it would not be possible for a human, as three-dimensional creatures, to understand it.

  Sagan said that a three-dimensional creature would have the same experience seeing a four-dimensional object as a one-dimensional creature would have seeing a two- or three-dimensional object. He said, “Let us suppose that we are flat—I mean, absolutely flat—and that the whole universe was flat, too. We would have evolved with flat eyes that could only see along a constant, flat surface. We could not look up, or down, only straight ahead on a perfectly flat surface. Now, if a three-dimensional object were to somehow come into our flat universe and land right in front of us, we would only be able to see a sliver of that object, a ‘flat slice’ directly in front of us, and not the rest of the object above or below us. We would be physically incapable of looking up at the rest of it, our eyes and brains only developed to see and comprehend all objects in the universe in a perfectly flat picture. Also, though, the three-dimensional object would be incapable of interacting with we one-dimensional creatures in any meaningful way.” Sagan had waxed philosophical about what might happen if humans could somehow see beyond the dimensions they were bound to. “What might we see?” he asked, again and again, with almost regret that he would never know.

  Sagan was a smart man, but Kaley figured he didn’t know how lucky he was that he couldn’t see it.

  So that was it. It was as close to a word as Kaley could pin to it. It was another dimension—not another world, not another planet or universe—but another fact of the reality she was already familiar with, just another slice of the Great Big Everything we all inhabit.

  “But you have to be careful ’bout all o’ that talkin’ an’ them words,” her Nan had once told her, when on the topic of attention deficit disorder, something that had bothered Nan since first hearing about it. “They sometimes give a name to somethin’ because they don’t unnerstan it, an’ a word can trick the mind into thankin’ it knows somethin’ it don’t.”

  There was a soft, inaudible click, and Kaley felt Spencer was successful with the first lock. Indeed, he removed the lock picks from the bottom lock and began addressing the lock above it. “Talk to me,” Spencer finally said into the deafening silence between them. “Let’s pass the time a little while I work. How’ve ya been, sport?”

  “What do you care?” she said. All around her, kids were scuttling faster and faster, fearful of being late. Well, all except a few lost souls who couldn’t care less about their grades or how their lives would turn out because of their absenteeism. She became caught up in the forward movement, propelled by that bell like all the others, a cattle call of sorts. The water foamed a little more, flowed a little faster around her ankles.

  They don’t see it. None of them do.

  “You’re right,” Spencer said. “I don’t care much. Least, not about you an’ what happened to, eh, what’s her name?”

  “Shannon,” she said. “You know her name.” In the school atrium, she was now climbing the steps. A goth boy she didn’t know looked at her when she spoke. The kid asked her if she was talking to him, but she just kept talking as if he wasn’t there, and then he pretended he wasn’t. “If you don’t care about her, then why are you asking?”

  “Because, I wanna know what they said about me.” He got hold of another tumbler pin. Kaley could feel it, and also felt it slip away.

  “What who said?”

  “The cops.”

  Oh, of course. It’s about him. It’s always about him. “I tried telling them what we saw. I didn’t want to at first, but…the missing cop.”

  “Emerson,” he said, regaining the lost tumbler pin. His tongue was just touching his top lip whenever he wasn’t talking, and his eyes were squinted in concentration. “Yeah, I read all about him in the paper. He the one got eaten by the house?” Kaley nodded. “I never saw his picture in the paper, just read the story, but I figured it had to be him.” A satisfying click, so faint it was almost inaudible, and then Spencer pulled his picks out and addressed the final lock. “So, they wanted to know about that little detail. I guess they said ‘Where’d he go?’ an’ shit like that, huh? Ya finally cracked, tried to explain it, but they couldn’t understand. Like trying to explain a three-dimensional object to a one-dimensional animal.”

  Kaley tilted her head. Where did that come from? Was it coincidence, or is he picking up thoughts from me? It had certainly happened that night in Atlanta. Spencer’s thoughts had been like a radio transmission distorted and faint at first, but they had become clearer the closer he came to Kaley and Shan. His thoughts had begun to bleed over into hers, and vise versa. They’d seen things in each other, things that had made them both not just a little uncomfortable.

  “Yeah,” she said, watching him work, and stepping through a set of double doors on the second floor of the school. Absently, she thought about breezing by her locker to offload some of her books, but decided she was going to be cutting it close as it was. “Yeah, they wanted more. Child psychologists were brought in. They thought it was shock. I guess some of it was, right?”

  “Probably,” said Spencer, only half interested. He only cares about the bits concerning himself. “What else did you tell ’em?”

  “Pretty much what you heard on TV or read in the papers.”

  “Bullshit. Ya told them somethin’ else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that I was a fuckin’ pedophile, too, an’ that I was in on it with Dmitry an’ those fuckers.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah?” he said, fishing for the final tumble in the lock. “Then how come my mug’s all over Interpol’s website, an’ how come they got a profile on me sayin’ I was involved with the Rainbow Room and the vory?”

  “I don’t know, I swear.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” he said, working more furiously. His tone was like that of a volcano, considering the pros and cons of erupting.

  “I’m not,” she said.

  “You told them somethin’ else. I’m never wrong about people. I know you told them somethin’—”

  “One of your fucking problems, Spencer, is that you’re almost never wrong!” she shouted. Then, she emphasized again, “Almost.”

  A sharper click this time. The final lock was picked, and at about the same time that the tardy bell was ringing at school. Given this new impetus, she hustled on down the hall to room 208, Mrs. Cartwright’s room. She’s going to kill me. It was funny, not only was she present in two places at once, but her mind and intentions were also in two places—she was simultaneously concerned about the life of the boy in the basement as well as worried that she might be sent to Principal Manning again for tardiness. Strange how a simple school bell could provoke such a response, even at such a dire time. Like Pavlov’s dog. She’d read about that as well.

  Kaley watched as Spencer withdrew his improvised lock picks and stood up, tested the doorknob, and opened it slowly. He pulled his Glock out from his jacket and stood back away from the door as he swung it wide. Water was trickling down these stairs, as well, foaming and frothing all the way down. Spencer didn’t seem to see it, either. He was as oblivious to it as the kids at school were.

  Spencer s
tood to one side of the door and peeked inside.

  “There’s nothing down there besides the boy,” Kaley said. “If there was, I would’ve told you.”

  “How do I know that?” he said. Spencer reached inside slowly and flipped the switch, illuminating the long staircase below. “You don’t think I know what you are? You don’t think I know exactly what you’d like to do to me if given the chance? Huh?” Kaley looked at him, perplexed, as she approached her home room. Spencer chuckled. “After what you did to Dmitry an’ the others, an’ after seein’ inside my head, seein’ what I’ve done, you don’t think I know what you’d do to me if you could?”

  Kaley shook her head. “I would never—”

  “You would never only because you can’t. An’ ya wanna know how I know you can’t? Because you haven’t. Because you didn’t.” Spencer turned his back on her and took his first step down the staircase, gun up and pointed at the foot of the stairs. He whispered back to her, “And I know you’d try to kill me if you thought I was gonna hurt somebody you liked, or some other innocent.” He took another step down. “And you know I’d do whatever it takes to hurt you if you try to fuck with me. And you know that I know that you know that I know. So don’t say ‘I would never’ and act like it’s for altruistic principles, baby cakes. Spare me.”

  She didn’t like the way his mind worked. She didn’t like being this close to it. Oily and sludgy, it was like being caught in tar pits; the more she struggled the more she felt pulled down into a mind bereft of what she felt was essential to humanity. However, that “tar pit” of a mind was focused, and pensive. It seemed to resent doing anything but concentrating fiercely on the here and now, yet it had an eye cast towards the future. The mind also resisted multitasking, by and large, even though by the look on his face he frequently appeared to be juggling many considerations at once. There was nothing and no one indispensible to that mind. It also discounted any significance in the feelings of others, as well as in their souls and their opinions. Opinions, emotions, empathy; these things were all anathema to Spencer’s mindful, if devilish, approach.