by Chad Huskins
For a moment, Spencer imagined being trapped down here in this ersatz play room. How long had the kid endured? Not that he was feeling any sympathy, but the walls did feel strangely close together. And, if he didn’t know any better, he’d say they were getting even closer together by the moment. Something moved past his leg. Spencer turned and aimed the gun at the floor, but there was nothing there. For a few seconds after that, he felt like…like there was cold, moving water against his ankles. When he walked back over to Kaley, he could almost feel the slight resistance of that water, and he knew it was coming from her.
The apparition girl remained silent and still. The boy continued trembling uncontrollably. And all around him, Spencer got the distinct feeling that other forces were at work. Not just here in this room, and not just surrounding Kaley Dupré. He’d come to Zakhar Ogorodnikov’s house based on information he extracted from some of his people back in Derbent. It wouldn’t be too long before the rest of the Russian families followed a bread crumb trail out here, or for that matter Interpol might do the same, or police forces from Moscow and Chelyabinsk.
Spencer had a few choices to make here. Every second he lingered was another second that other interested parties could be connecting the dots, but if the girl had been telling the truth, and the boy did know something, then leaving now could mean losing his last chance to make good on his promise to Dmitry. If he decided to leave, did it make more sense to leave the boy alive or dead, now that he’d seen Spencer’s face? Killing the boy would certainly upset Kaley, but he also felt certain it would go a long ways towards crippling her. Kill the boy, and emotionally cripple the girl.
Emotions were the root of her power. Intuitively, he understood this. It was why these whispers were coming to him. Kaley Dupré’s power to empathize is what had allowed her to absorb her sister’s pain that night on Avery Street. It had also allowed her to absorb Spencer’s rage and her captors’ carnal desires, creating a powerful brew of free-floating hell, consuming anything and anyone in its path, regardless of whether or not they were deserving of retribution.
But that brought him to another thought: If I kill the boy, might it also just kick-start another chain reaction inside o’ her? That could be bad for Spencer. Not that he cared. He’d made her a promise to hurt the boy if she lied, and Spencer Pelletier always kept his promises. Always.
“…as long as he’s near her…” came the whisper again, up through his bones, shivering down his spine. “It’s our chance. We cannot miss this convergence. She’s stronger when she’s near him, we cannot pass up this convergence.”
Spencer watched the walls, the floor, and the slow-spinning ceiling fan above his head. He turned back to the apparition girl, ruminating. Then, he walked over to the table, kicked it to the side, and pressed the pistol to the top of the boy’s head. This did not have any effect on Kaley Dupré; she was in some kind of a trance, eyes shut, lips slightly parted, and a sliver of drool dangling from her lower lip.
“Ya got five minutes,” Spencer said. “After that, if he’s not talkin’, this kid’s a permanent resident. Zakhar’s ghost can diddle his.”
“I’m working on it,” said Kaley. Her voice was monotone. “I can’t hurry this any faster. I’m…not even sure how this works. I’m still learning.”
“Hope you’re a fast learner.”
“Just calm down—”
“Something’s down here with us,” he said.
Kaley nodded slowly. “I know.”
“It’s all around us. Swimming, pressing against…I dunno, the air. Tryin’ to get through somehow.”
“I know.”
“Yeah?” he said, looking down on her. “How long have ya known?”
“Since Avery Street,” Kaley said.
“Who are they?”
“Others.”
Spencer snorted. “What do they want?”
“Us.” More drool fell from the apparition’s lips. Spencer started to ask her to elaborate again, but the girl held up a hand. “Please, if you want this to work, I need you to be quiet.”
“What did I tell ya about—”
“It wasn’t a command, it was a request. Spencer, will you please be quiet?”
“She knows,” said the voice. “And he knows, too. Keep searching…keep searching…so close.”
“Get a move on, chick-a-dee,” Spencer said, moving his foot when he felt something lick it, something he couldn’t see. “It’s gettin’ a little crowded in here.”
The best Kaley had ever been able to manage was using her imagination to put emotions into concrete objects—her occasional research had turned up another term for this: dynamic visualization. Back on Avery Street, it had come to her more out of reflex, as if some survival mechanism deeply embedded inside of her had all at once flipped a switch.
This wasn’t actually as hard as it sounded. Both Kaley and her sister Shannon had a form of what was called synesthesia, only they hadn’t known it because they had never adequately expressed it to an adult, and indeed it was rarely ever diagnosed until a person was old enough to realize that not everybody saw the world they did.
People with synesthesia, or synesthetes, had a special neurological condition that commonly made it so that they perceived letters and/or numbers as inherently having color: the number four might always be seen as green, the number nine as red, and so forth. To synesthetes, even people could have color, or might be represented as a number—someone tall and angular might be a seven, a proud person might always be thought of as eight, and a heavyset proud person might be seen as eighty eight—and also as a color—introverts were typically seen as bluish, while extroverts may be more vibrant hues of orange.
But Kaley wasn’t quite a synesthete, though there were definite similarities. The emotions she felt were usually assigned a “feeling” like a crawling or tickling sensation on her skin, or a visual of some landscape she’d seen on National Geographic. It was even more so since her powers had begun to take shape. Having witnessed the twisted topography of Spencer Pelletier’s mind, and having survived it, had granted her some strange insight.
The boy’s name was nowhere to be found in his thought-emotions (the charm didn’t quite work like that). Though identity was typically vital to a person, names seemed to have nothing to do with that identity; they were the last thing on people’s minds.
The boy’s emotions were in retreat. Everything he had ever been had retreated, likely part of the same kind of reflexive survival instinct that Kaley had struck upon in the basement on Avery Street. Paramount on his mind was his despair. For Kaley, this despair came to her, almost unbidden, as a frozen wasteland—maybe this was the boy projecting what he knew of Siberia back to her, or maybe this was only feedback from Kaley’s own mind, her thoughts on the storm she’d seen outside this lodge…
The boy’s mind was far afield. A tortured landscape of splitting, shifting icebergs was all around her. Kaley stood on one of them, and somewhere…somewhere there was a voice…a voice on the wind. “She’s spreading herself too thin,” it said, with growing vehemence. “She’s weak now. Vulnerable. Keep searching, brothers. She’s here. She’s here!”
Not the voice she was looking for.
A wind whipped up, and Kaley felt as cold as she had outside in the shed, watching Spencer put on his tire chains. Thinking of Spencer made her think of the timeline he’d given her. “Ya got five minutes,” he’d said. Kaley believed she’d calmed him down some, but she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know if she’d actually spoken to him or if that had all been in her mind.
The voice said I’m spreading myself too thin. That I’m vulnerable like this.
The voice might be right. She was in three places now instead of just two, and on some level she was aware of things happening at all the other levels. Here she was, bending over the water fountain to take a sip, looking up at the banner in front of her that saidMS. MITCHELL’S CLASS : BEST ESSAYS OF THE MONTH, and had examples of those essays stapled on the
board. Here she was, sitting on the cold concrete floor of a basement inside a dead child rapist’s hunting lodge. Here she was, standing amid the icy wasteland of emotions that were roiling off of the abused child in front of her.
There was no avatar for the child here, no lost boy amid all that frozen ice. He was the frozen ice. A lonely, desolate, blank space filled with nothing but cold. The isolation had gotten to him, the removal from his family arguably as damaging as anything the Russian had done to him.
In one of these worlds that Kaley occupied, another boy late to class paused while hustling up the stairs near the water fountain, where she was taking a prolonged drink. For a moment, they locked eyes. The boy looked familiar—His name’s Andrew something—a mixed race kid that Kaley thought was kind of cute. Maybe he thought she was cute, too, according to the reading she was getting off of him, and, more importantly, how quickly he averted his gaze from hers. He hustled on to class…
…and left Kaley in a wasteland of the utmost suffering a human being could endure. All hers to share, and no one else’s. Well, hers and the boy’s to share.
There was a deep, deep cracking beneath the surface of the ice, a tectonic shift. The ice was considering breaking apart—this was Kaley’s interpretations of the boy’s small hope, an almost-willingness to let the barriers fall, an inkling to lower his defenses, and put the pain to one side.
Kaley encouraged this. But she still needed some sort of anchor for herself, a point of reference to begin her work. Kindling, as her mom’s ex-boyfriend Ricky had once called it. “Add some more kindlin’, I reckon,” he had said. “Then build it up slowly. Add too much too soon, an’ it’ll smother it. Put some twigs in, then a few small branches, then the bigger stuff. Let it catch fire slowly. Slowly.”
Something to keep her warm, physically and emotionally. Shannon. Just the thought evoked powerful shifts. All at once, Kaley didn’t feel cold anymore. In fact, she was radiating a heat that started in the sky, bathed the entire frozen landscape in white-orange sunlight. Soon, she was sweating, in all three worlds.
Even as she finished drinking her water and stood up from the fountain, Kaley attempted to send warm, comforting rays to help melt the ice some more. At first the immense ice resisted, the world became colder all around—The boy is untrusting of sincere people and emotions—but then she discovered receptivity in the cracks between the icebergs. It began as a trickle—bubbling little streams of melted fears pushing between the cracks. Then rivers of melted fears flowed between the cracks, eroding at the seams.
Be water, she thought, and tried transmitting the notion to the boy. Like Bruce Lee said, be like water. That part came from thinking of Shannon: Shan was a big kung fu movie fan. All at once, she thought she felt a teeny, tiny part of the boy’s imagination awaken, some adventurous portion that every child innately had, but more so because boys liked action heroes. Somewhere, a small, hopeful voice said, “I like Bruce Lee.”
Kaley seized on it, wouldn’t let it go. “Be formless, shapeless, like water,” she said, quoting the famous words of the martial arts legend.
“What the fuck did you say?” That was Spencer, the cynicism dripping off him and threatening to undo her good work.
Kaley had a hold on the boy now and would not let it go. If heroes was what it took to break down the boy’s walls, then she would grip that part of him, and like a dog with a bone, she wouldn’t let go. “You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. You put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Water is the softest substance there is, but given time it penetrates the toughest rock. Water can flow, or creep, or crash. Be water, my friend.”
The rivers of melted fears picked up speed, melting the other blocks of fear all around it.
“You like Bruce Lee, huh?” she said.
A small voice spoke inside that Pine-Sol-smelling basement. The boy’s voice. He was actually talking now, responding directly to her. “Yeah,” he said tentatively.
“He your favorite hero?”
“No.”
“Who is?”
“I like…” There were a few sniffles. When he spoke again, he did so with an accent Kaley could describe only as British, or close enough to it. “I like Batman. He’s my favorite.”
Kaley laughed, her eyes still shut, focused. “I like Batman, too. He’s very strong, and very smart, isn’t he?” The rivers of melted ice now flowed through Kaley. She accepted them, removed them from the child, and the rivers ran down her face. She smiled through the tears, continually sending him rays of sunlight, eating away at the icebergs surrounding her. “Batman suffered a lot as a child, but he took that pain and he turned it into strength. Now everyone in Gotham City knows, you don’t mess with the Bat.”
“I like Wolverine, too,” he said, more earnestly now, and with less sniffles. “I like his claws.”
Heroes. He needs heroes, the purest form of adventure and hope for a young boy. Someone that can shine a light, take his mind off the darkness, and give him faith in something better.
“Wolverine is one o’ my favorites, too,” she said. “You know why?”
“His claws?”
“No.”
“His healing powers?”
She laughed. “No, chil’, no. It’s because he’s a survivor. He’s been through so much hurt. He deals with it every day. Not just physical pain, but so much pain in his heart. In his soul. I like Wolverine because he’s tough. Lots of bad things happened to him in the past, but how he got past all that pain…oh, lawd, chil’, how he got past all o’ that pain, that’s his real super power.”
The boy seemed to consider this. He sniffled, wiped his nose, and chuckled. That beautiful, beautiful chuckle. “Now nobody messes with Wolverine, either.”
“No, chil’. No, they don’t. They know better’n that. They all learned. An’ over time, Wolverine found friends, an’ a family—”
“The X-Men!”
“That’s right!” she laughed. “He found that he wasn’t alone. There were others like him, others with pain so deep that they didn’t think they could survive. But they leaned on each other, didn’t they? They leaned on each other an’ they grew, an’ they loved, an’ they accepted one another, an’ they protected each other.”
Soon, the ice was only too happy to let go. It split and lurched, great cracks had been etched in the seams and now it all broke apart, great showers of fears falling into the sea, perishing beneath the icy waters. Kaley took it all, absorbed it into her own stream. I’ll take it, she thought. I’ll take it because I can, because I’m built for it. Give it all to me. I can handle it. I can take your burden. Kaley wasn’t erasing his memory—far from it—she was merely removing the fear and guilt that the boy felt over what had been done to him.
In that other world at Cartersville Middle School, Kaley had already turned and was walking back to Mrs. Cartwright’s classroom. In the basement, Kaley finally opened her eyes, and looked into the face of the little boy, peeking his head out like a timid little turtle out of his shell, wondering if it truly was safe to come out. Kaley continued bathing him in warmth, wrapping him in her arms, even though she never touched him. She couldn’t, not in this form.
Kaley stared at the boy.
The boy stared right back, and sniffled.
“Ask him his name,” said Spencer, butting in. She had almost forgotten about him, and his blunt, uncaring mind was jarring in the moment.
“Spencer,” she whispered, keeping the smile on her face. “I’m asking you to please, please be quiet.”
In his pocket, Spencer’s phone rang again, and he silenced it. “The kid better know something, is all I’m saying.”
Kaley tried not to think on that. What would Spencer do if he found out she really had lied to him? She’d told him that the name At-ta Biral had come from the boy, when the truth was the only mind she felt fully connected with, enough to extract any specific information from, was his. It was that, or watc
h him drive away, leaving the boy here. But Kaley felt confident the boy would know something about his captors. He must have seen something along the way. How could he know absolutely nothing?
At school, Kaley reached the door to room 208. She kept looking at the boy, smiling with her lips, eyes, and heart. Then, all at once, the boy started crying, but these were tears of unadulterated joy, so pure and powerful that she nearly felt knocked over. The boy then darted out from underneath the table and went to hug her. “No, chil’, don’t! I can’t—”
Kaley was afraid the boy might reel back when he found out she was more or less a kind of ghost. But something happened then. Something that sent her mind reeling, and caused Spencer to take a step back.
In the basement, the boy threw his arms around Kaley, and embraced her. In the hallway, her right hand had just passed straight through the doorknob to Mrs. Cartwright’s room.
At school, Kaley stood looking dumbly down at the door. In the basement, she held the boy, squeezed him as tight as she had ever squeezed Shan after waking from her worst nightmares, and stared up at Spencer, who was looking down at her with a mixture of uncertainty and mistrust.
4
Gun trained on the girl’s head, Spencer took two or three steps backward, towards the exit. The basement had grown colder, and though he no longer heard the whispers of Kaley Dupré’s “Others,” or felt the cold wetness licking at his ankles, the scene in front of him was growing far more irrational the more he thought about it.
The boy, presumably, was no kind of spirit. If he had been, then Zakhar Ogorodnikov could not have had his fun. But the apparition girl had most certainly passed through Spencer only moments ago, and he’d seen her pass halfway through the Subaru in the shed outside. So then, how was it that she was here, now, in this room, holding the little boy in her arms like a mother, with one arm around his waist and the other on the back of his head, pressing his face into her shoulder?