Perdition

by PM Drummond

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s say this is real. Why didn’t my father ever tell me about these people? Why didn’t I ever meet them?”

  I am blind to your father’s life. The power does not exist within him. You have not met your ancestors because they do not exist on the same plane with you.

  “So they’re dead.”

  As you understand the word, yes.

  The figures in the distance loomed slightly larger than they had been a moment ago. I nodded toward them.

  “What are those?”

  Your power animals.

  Frustrating. The little bug only answered what I asked. He didn’t expound on anything. Or maybe I just wasn’t asking the right questions.

  “So who are you?”

  I am your spirit guide. The others access you through me. Likewise, your path to them lies through me.

  The shapes were almost distinguishable now in the feathery blackness. They ranged in size from massive to small. One looked like a bull. Bright light from a fiery ball sitting on its back outlined its wide head and horns in stark relief. Striking the air with a front hoof, it snorted fire out its nose.

  Two of the small shapes on the ground took flight, one rasping out a loud caw, the other screaming a shrill cry. The crow and an eagle-like bird hovered above the other animals well away from the flaming bull.

  No more than twenty feet away now, the menagerie stopped, waiting. The black horse to the far left of the group reared on its hind legs then settled onto all fours, throwing its head up and down in restless impatience. Or maybe it was just nervous from the giant grizzly bear sitting serenely next to it. A puma stood next to the bear, its eyes fixed on me, ignoring the other animals. On the other side of the bull, a white swan the size of a grade-school child preened its feathers below one wing.

  The moth spoke again, and I jerked back and yelped. I calmed by convincing myself that hallucinations couldn’t hurt me. The moth quieted until I got myself together, then continued.

  Each power animal will reveal itself to you when your life path calls it, Moth said.

  The horse stepped forward, head down. I held my floating body as still as I could, refusing to flinch at an imaginary animal. Reaching me, it pushed its nose under my hand, and I stroked its velvety face. He lifted his head to nuzzle my hair.

  Horse already walks the path with you, Moth said.

  I smiled and pulled away from the animal’s sweet, hay-scented breath, which tickled my neck.

  “I think I would have noticed a horse walking with me,” I said.

  You did, Moth said. Kava’i joined you yesterday.

  Disagreement died on my lips.

  “Astral projection,” I said, remembering the horse-shaped blob in Rune’s apartment and being at my Grandma’s house and in Rune’s apartment at the same time.

  As you understand it, Moth said. It’s known as Spirit walking to The People.

  “The People?”

  Yaqui. Your people.

  I peered around Horse to the other animals.

  “What powers do the rest of them have?” I asked.

  You will know when your life path merges with them.

  Shoot. I hated surprises.

  “Why can’t I just have them all now?”

  Small steps are best when walking on a precipice.

  “Precipice?” I said.

  The scene before me blurred then refocused, the images less clear than they had been before.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  You are waking, Moth said.

  “They’ll just put me under again, and I’ll be right back here.”

  You must control the machine that tells them you are awake.

  “The vitals machine?” I said. “Which animal does that?”

  No animal. Use the power of your mother’s kin.

  “The telekinesis? But . . .”

  Use the power to control the machine. Use Kava’i to see.

  Another bout of blurring, this time longer and my focus was even worse when I returned.

  “Wait,” I said to the small, green blur I assumed was Moth. “How do I find you again?”

  I am always with you. Your life-force creates a bridge as strong as the drums and peyote of your shaman ancestors. Open your inner eye to us, and you will see what has been there all along. Your mother’s gift is the portal between our planes of being.

  During the next blurring, I felt my physical body on the gurney—the IV needle in my arm, the monitor pads on my chest and head, the increasing beep-beep of my vitals echoing through the monitor. Then I returned to Moth’s faint glow and the outlines of the other animals—all but Horse, who still stood by me in sharper focus.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I called to the shapes.

  Trust yourself. You are your own best counsel. But turn your face from the dark one. Now that the bridge is complete, she will come.

  “Dark one?”

  Horse nudged me with his nose, and I popped back into my body. An alarm squealed on the vitals machine. I opened my eyes and saw the heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure numbers climb. Another machine’s wired pen scratched deep waves onto a scrolling length of paper. I’d seen that type of machine on Real Stories of the ER. It measured brain waves, and it was telling Sarkis and his men I was awake. A small camera nestled in the corner of the ceiling moved toward my face, and I closed my eyes.

  Control the machines. But how? Sweet hay-scented breath warmed my ear. I visualized the room but only created a two-dimensional picture in my mind. I needed to feel my surroundings as I had my grandmother’s bedroom. Again, warm breath brushed my ear. I called to Horse in my mind, and the room’s image came alive, Horse standing beside me, shaking his massive head up and down then raising his nose to the air and shaking his long black mane.

  I concentrated on the machines, connecting with their power, their raw electricity tingling across my brain. Homing in on the numbers, I willed them down, guessing at levels that would show me still under the influence of the drugs. The brainwave tape had just settled back to a small squiggly line with the door opened.

  With eyes still closed, I concentrated on keeping my body still and breathing shallow. A man in a white lab coat entered my astral picture of the room. He lacked the lethal mercenary bearing of the other men, but still carried himself with military confidence and precision. Dustings of gray shone across his close-cut black hair, and his brown eyes were almost hidden behind thick, black, plastic rimmed glasses. It all gave the appearance of a middle-aged Clark Kent.

  When he walked through Horse’s hindquarters, he shivered, rubbed his arms, and glanced toward the ceiling vent. After checking the monitors, he keyed a small walkie-talkie.

  “Everything checks out,” he said. “Her respiration is a little low, but her oxygen levels are normal.”

  “Check the EEG for brain activity,” Sarkis said over the small speaker. “Don’t make the mistake of trusting these paranormals. They can be tricky.”

  Clark checked the paper tape, and then keyed the mike again.

  “It does show increased activity lasting ninety-three seconds, ending about two minutes ago, but it’s subsided now.”

  “Ten-four, that’s what it reads here,” Sarkis said. “Make sure the drug pump is still working. I want her visually checked every fifteen minutes until I say otherwise.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Clark open the windowed door of a white box attached to my IV pole, revealing two large tubes of cloudy liquid with mechanized plungers on top of each. After wiggling a few connections, he closed the little door, pushed a few buttons, and wrote numbers from the screen on a clipboard at the foot of my bed.

  Little else occupied the room. Just me in my bed, an adjoining small bathroom, the IV contraption, and several other machines at the end of the sticky probes that covered my chest and head. And I couldn’t forget Horse, still standing next to my bed, taking up a majority of the ten-by-ten space.

  Clark stopped when
he walked through Horse again on his way to the door. He eyed the ceiling vent again, and then checked a thermostat on the wall. He put his hand on a small, white panel near the door, and punched in a five-digit code on a keypad attached to it. On his way out the door, he activated his mike again.

  “Have Hector check this room. There’re cold spots. Combine those with the machine glitches, we may have another facilities issue.”

  The door clicked shut, and I was alone again. Alone as I could be with cameras and monitors watching my every move, breath, and heartbeat, and a giant black horse staring at me.

  Horse turned and walked to the doorway, stopping with his shoulders and head on the other side of the closed door and the rest of his body on my side. He twisted, and his face appeared through the wall. Dark eyes fixed on me, he shook his gleaming black head up and down then turned and walked all the way through the door out of sight.

  Horse had abandoned me.

  Momentary panic surged through me, and the monitors spiked before I regained control of them again. After a few tense moments, the man I now thought of as Clark still hadn’t come running back in, and I relaxed enough to think. If Horse could walk through walls and travel, maybe I could, too.

  It proved tricky to move without a corporeal body, but after a few attempts, I pushed away from the bed. The white, flowing dress from my dreamlike moth encounter covered me. I stood as a semitransparent haze on the linoleum, aware and feeling my own being but feeling nothing else around me—not even the floor I stood on.

  I took a few steps and moved across the room, still not feeling the ground beneath me, the sensation fraught with unreality. An ethereal gold cord as big around as a fire hose spanned from the bellybutton of my astral self to the bellybutton of my body on the bed. I took a few steps back and the cord lengthened, a few steps forward and it shortened—kind of like the retractable chain on a janitor’s key ring. I grabbed the cord. It sizzled and clung to my fingers like electrically charged cotton candy. Gross. I let it go and decided to check on it from time to time. It was no weirder than a horse that people could walk through, and I still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t all a hallucination.

  At the door, I closed my eyes and took two more steps. When I opened my eyes, I stood on the other side in a worn once-white hallway with Horse staring at me from three feet away. His immobile stance and slow blinking gaze exuded a tried patience.

  I rolled my eyes at him and put my hands on my hips—childish and petty, and probably not even that impressive in my translucent state, but it made me feel better.

  “Listen. I haven’t even decided you’re real,” I said. “Don’t get an attitude with me.”

  He waggled his head from side to side and turned to walk down the hall, so I followed him. We turned right at the second intersecting hallway and stopped three rooms down. Horse struck his hoof on the floor near the closed door.

  “What?” I said. “We go in here?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why can’t you talk like the moth?” I asked. A stupid rhetorical question since he couldn’t answer me.

  He swung his head and nudged me toward the door. His touch tingled like a low electrical current.

  “Hey,” I said, rubbing my arm. “How come I can feel you, but nothing else? And how come you can shove me, but Clark Kent could walk right through you? Who makes these rules?”

  He nudged me again, harder this time, and I stumbled through the closed door.

  The room was the same size as mine, but contained only a bed, table, and two chairs. Someone lay under the blankets, facing away from me, the covers pulled around the back of their head. I crossed the room and peered over the blanket mound to the person’s exposed face.

  “Mom?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MOM

  My mom pulled down the covers and raised her head a little. After a moment, she lowered her head again and pulled the covers back over her ear.

  “Mom,” I said a little louder.

  She removed the blanket from her head and sat up to look around the room. She looked right through me to the door.

  “Mom, can you hear me?”

  She tilted her head.

  “Marlee? Is that you? Where are you?”

  I scanned the room to see if anyone was around to hear her. In the corner of the ceiling there was a small camera like the one in my room. The little light wasn’t blinking, but better safe than sorry.

  “I don’t want them to know you can hear me,” I said. “Lay back down like you were before and we’ll both whisper, okay?”

  She laid back down and faced the wall again without hesitation. After years with my domineering father, she was obedient to a fault. To kidnap her, Sarkis’s men probably just just had to show up at the front door and tell her to get in the car.

  Once she got settled, she said, “Okay. I’m lying down.”

  I started to say, “No kidding,” then realized she didn’t know I could see her. She probably thought that I was in the next room talking through the wall.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “Did they hurt you?”

  “No, honey. They’ve been very nice. It hasn’t been too bad at all.”

  Considering the life she lived day in and day out, this was probably like a vacation to her. I’d have to try harder to convince her to come stay with me—assuming, of course, that we both lived through this.

  “That’s good,” I said. “I’m working on getting us out of here.”

  “Where are you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m in a room near you. I’m okay.”

  What was I going to say? I’m knocked out two halls over with a giant horse no one but me can see? No. Best to keep it simple with my mom.

  “Are we going home soon?” she said. “That doctor fellow said we’d go home as soon as he had a chance to talk to you. You really shouldn’t have made him go to such lengths to meet with him.”

  Good grief. She couldn’t even take my side against a homicidal mad scientist. Maybe I shouldn’t try to get her to live with me. I felt terrible as soon as I thought that. No one deserved to live with my dad. Well, except maybe Dr. Sarkis. I chuckled just thinking about that one.

  “It’s not funny, Marlena. Your father is going to be very difficult when I get back. No one to cook or clean. He’ll be beside himself,” she said.

  “About dad,” I said. “Were his mother and sisters shaman?”

  Mom’s body went rigid under the blankets, and her breathing stopped.

  “Mom, answer me.”

  “We don’t talk about that, Marlee. Your father forbids it.”

  Like he forbid me to use my telekinesis, and look what good that did.

  “Mom, I have to know. It may make the difference in getting us out of here.”

  She was silent so long, I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she let out a breath and continued.

  “They were evil,” she said, her voice barely a whisper like she thought my father may hear from hundreds of miles away. “They tortured him.”

  “Who?”

  “His own mother and sisters. He would never talk about it. I only figured it out from his nightmares, and those only started after you—”

  She sucked in a breath and turned her face into the mattress.

  “After I what?” I asked.

  “Started moving things.”

  If I’d been flesh and blood, I’d have thrown up. I’d been right. My father hated me because of my telekinesis but the core of that hatred lurked even deeper.

  “Is that when he started drinking?” I asked, thinking I already knew the answer.

  “No. That started after he saw her in your room.”

  “Saw who?”

  “His mother.” She wrapped the blanket around herself and rocked back and forth. It was bad enough she was here because of me. Now I was making her more miserable, but I had to know the truth.

  “So she came to visit?”

  “N
o. She died before you were born.” Her rocking increased. “Marlee, he said to never talk about her, and to never, never say her name. He said your power brought her back. The more you moved things, the worse he got. We had to stop you from using your power.”

  Thoughts raced through my brain too fast to catch. So many thoughts that I couldn’t think. Couldn’t absorb the information that crashed down on me. My mother whispered something else too low for me to hear.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He used to scream it in his sleep,” she said.

  I really didn’t want to know, but this freight train of truth had too much speed now to stop.

  “Scream what?” I asked, not really wanting her to answer but needing to know. It felt important, like my life hinged on her answer.

  “The dark one is coming,” she said and sobbed into her pillow. “His mother was coming.”

  Horse stuck the front half of his body through the door, shook his head, and snorted. I assumed that was nontalking horse language for “hurry up.”

  “Mom, I think I have to go,” I said.

  “Okay, honey.” Her voice sounded like a small frightened child.

  “I’ll get us out of here.”

  When I turned toward the door, a wave of vertigo hit me. The room blacked in and out a few times in rapid succession like a TV picture going on the fritz. When the room snapped back, my gold cord linking astral me to my body paled, becoming almost translucent.

  What would happen if the cord disappeared? Would I be stuck outside my body? Maybe forever? I had to get back to my body and figure out a way to get mom out of here.

  I ran back out the door.

  “What’s wrong with my cord thingy?” I asked Horse, all of the horror from a moment ago coalescing into anger and frustration.

  He nudged me toward my room as a reply.

  “So I’m right, and the paleness isn’t a good thing?”

  He pushed me almost knocking me on my ethereal face. The hallway blinked in and out, and again when I came back the cord turned even paler.

  I ran as fast as my incorporeal legs would take me back to my room. At my bedside, I stopped next to my body—the real flesh and bone one. I turned back to Horse.