Captain Quad

by Sean Costello

  And it made him realize, with sudden, inarguable clarity, what he must do.

  He turned and strode out to the foyer, grabbed his coat from the rack. . . and then slumped tearfully against the doorjamb.

  It was no use. Peter was his brother. Sam would sooner kill himself.

  He let his coat fall in a heap on the hallway runner. In defeated shuffles he made his way into his room. He had a dim urge to try Kelly's number again, but he'd already let it ring off the wall. There had been no answer. Maybe he was already too late.

  The feel of her limp and sobbing body tried to insinuate itself on Sam's surrender, but he blocked it from his mind. He opened his closet, reached behind a tote bag stuffed with hockey gear, and brought out a latched balsawood box. Originally it had contained assorted Italian wines. Now it housed Sam's most cherished mementos—the hockey crests he'd accumulated over the years, press clippings from out-of-town games, team photos, a folding pocket knife his father had given him—but mostly, it contained souvenirs of his life with Peter. He fingered through these items now, unmindful of the late hour, the sweetness of nostalgia somehow nullifying the awful truth of the present.

  Here was a Polaroid of Peter climbing out of the two-seater Cessna he'd used for his first solo flight. Their uncle Jim had joked later that Peter's smile had been harder to look at on that sunny spring day than the polished steel blades of the prop, And here he was in a grainy clipping from the Star, hoisting the city trophy overhead. Sam could just make out Rhett Kiley's grinning mug on the sidelines. Another shot, this one a thumb-printed Kodachrome, showed Peter and Kelly on Peter's motorcycle. They'd been doing a test run that day with all the gear they meant to take with them on their trip.

  How perfect they looked together. How much in love they had been. . .

  No, Sam thought tiredly, Peter could never hurt Kelly Wheeler. And that was true. The Peter Sam had known would no more have harmed another human being than he would have snatched an old woman's purse. But Peter had changed. He had perhaps said it best himself when he raged at Sam from his bed: "You're not my brother anymore!" It had taken six years of torture and humiliation, but that beer truck had finally snuffed the last remaining shred of Peter Gardner. What was left in that ninth-floor hospital bed was. . . something else.

  Peter was dead.

  And unlike their mother, Sam knew it wouldn't be enough to just sit by and ignore the remains.

  He went back to the front door, picked up his coat—

  And the phone rang.

  "Sam?" The word was a sob.

  "Kelly! I tried calling you. Are you all right?"

  "He was here, Sam." And in his mind Sam heard his mother's voice, creaking back from the grave: Your dear sweet brother was here. "He tried to kill me. . . burn me. . .”

  "Are you hurt?"

  "Not bad. . . can you come? I'm so afraid."

  "I'll be right over. I'll get a cab."

  She was still wearing the teddy. It was soaked, plastered to her skin, but the last vestiges of Sam's adolescent longing for this girl had died. The feeling ran much deeper now. It was love. A strange, forbidden, impossible love. The sight of her only fortified it.

  He helped her dress her wounds. Two of her fingers were bad—black, blistered, already weeping—but Kelly refused to have them formally ministered to. "Just wrap them," she told Sam, and he did. He found a burn medication called Flamazine in the bathroom cabinet and spread soothing dollops of it on her fingers, then on the lesser injuries on her arm.

  That done, Kelly trundled upstairs to get dressed. When she came back, wearing jeans and a bulky turtleneck sweater, she joined Sam on the couch. In the unflattering light, her face looked swollen and bruised. Her hair clung to her skull in a singed, matted mess; Sam could smell it from where he was sitting.

  Unable to meet Kelly's gaze, he began to speak in a slow, unbroken monotone. It was half past three in the morning.

  "He's gone crazy, Kelly. It kills me to have to say this, but my brother's insane. When I read all that stuff on his computer, I thought it was just. . . delusional. You know, all of that bitterness and hatred, and suddenly people start dying off, people he'd resented for years. I just figured that, since he could leave his body—and I knew that part was true, Kelly, I knew that for sure—I figured he just sort of. . . fantasized the whole thing. Took credit in his mind.

  "But then I came to the stuff about your friend." Sam hung his head, feeling an absurd pang of rejection at Peter's decision to keep all this from him. "He said he was going to get Will, Kelly. Get him out of the way." He regarded her with woeful eyes. "But how could I have known it was true? How—"

  "You couldn't have," Kelly said.

  "So I went back home," Sam continued, "sick inside, wondering what I could do for my brother. How I could help him be well again."

  Tears tracked Sam's ruddy cheeks and Kelly brushed them away. She knew what it was like to love Peter Gardner so fiercely.

  "That computer, it's full of the craziest stuff. Stuff about past lives. . . he thinks that you and he are soulmates, Kelly, and that you've been lovers since the beginning of time, tragic lovers who've been repeatedly thwarted on the brink of consummation. That's exactly how he put it: repeatedly thwarted.

  "And he thinks he's seen heaven, or something like it. A vault of souls, a plane of perfect peace, total knowledge, eternal life."

  Sam looked directly at Kelly. "He wants to take you there, Kelly. To this place. He wants to kill you—make you kill yourself—and then take you there. Be with you forever in this imaginary afterlife." Sam buried his face in his hands. "It's crazy. . . so fucking crazy!"

  Kelly blinked, saw Will's face in the candle flame, and shuddered. She was too confounded to speak.

  "He's dangerous, Kelly. I don't need to tell you that. He's a killer, and he's going to try for you again. And again, until he gets you."

  Kelly took Sam's hand and squeezed it. Her eyes were shiny with fear. "What are we going to do?"

  "Stop him," Sam said flatly. "There's no other choice."

  "When?" Kelly said. "And how?"

  "Right now," Sam answered.

  Then he told her how.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The telephone burred, the sound inconsequential in the whine of Peter's rage. He became aware of it by the fifth ring, and chinned his answering device. There was an electronic clunk as the line was engaged, then a low, tidal hiss.

  "Yes?" Peter said, directing his voice toward the amplified receiver. His unexpected expulsion from Kelly's mind had left him feeling sluggish and sick.

  "Peter, it's Sam." There was a pause, swollen with tension. "I'm with Kelly."

  Peter's head came up off the pillow. "I told you—"

  "No. I'm telling you," Sam said, his words coming all in a rush. "She doesn't want you, man. She wants me. I'm with her now, at her place. I know what you've been up to, I read—"

  Sam's words were cut off by a low, malevolent chuckle. "You're thinking with your dick now, bro. If you know what I've been up to, then you know that I can break your back like a twig. Don't fuck with me, kid. I mean it. Stay out of this."

  "I'm already in it," Sam said. "I'm in it to stay."

  "You asked for it, you stupid little fuck—"

  But he was talking to the dial tone.

  Peter closed his eyes, threw his head back on the pillow, and fell into a trance. It was as if a switch had been thrown.

  Nine floors below Sam stood by the lobby pay phone and tried to wrest back control of his body. All the nerves seemed to have run out of it at once—that evil chuckle, so cold and maliciously confident—and the air seemed suddenly too thin. For Sam this was the final stroke, the last stage in the slow metamorphosis of his life into bloody nightmare. It had begun six years ago with Peter's accident, and the transformation would soon be complete.

  He was about to murder his brother.

  No, that's not true. That thing upstairs is not your brother. You've got to remember that.
It killed your mother, it wants to kill Kelly. . . and it will kill you, too, if you let it. For once in your life show some balls. Do the right thing.

  Skirting the reception area, Sam slipped into a back stairwell. He took the risers in awkward strides, clutching the railing, that sensation of breathlessness heightening with each reluctant step. He felt sick and terrified, uncertain of his will.

  Just do it, a steadying voice said. Do it and get it over with.

  When he reached the ninth-floor landing Sam paused, gasping for breath, trying to bar all thought from his mind. Then he opened the door. After glancing both ways, he took the ten quick steps to his brother's room.

  It was dark in there now, not even the green swamp light of the computer to aid Sam's probing eye. The only light, scant as it was, came from the red LED mounted in the wall above Peter's bed. The size of a dime, it flashed with each mute cycle of Peter's diaphragmatic stimulator, printing spectral red highlights on the chrome. The bed was a vague black hump in the gloom.

  Sam hesitated in the doorway, listening for his brother's breathing. He heard only silence.

  "Peter?" he whispered, braced for a sudden attack. He stepped into the room and toed off the doorstop. The door sighed shut behind him. He twisted the bolt.

  "Peter?"

  Sam approached the bed in darkness, groping like a blind man for the reading light. The worst moment came then, as he reached across his brother's shriveled body for the pull chain. His vitals were exposed in that terrible instant, and in his mind Sam saw that blue fireball punching through his belly and frying his guts.

  He found the pull chain and tugged it. A soft yellow light flickered on. In its glow, Sam searched Peter's face for signs of awareness. There were none.

  Peter wasn't here.

  Moving cautiously, Sam stripped the covers off the bed. Then he slipped the pillow from beneath his brother's head.

  Kelly stood in front of the picture window, gazing out numbly at the night. A dense overcast had gorged the sky, and now it was lowering. It would probably snow before morning, if morning ever came. This night seemed endless. Endless and dark.

  She wrapped herself in her arms and closed her eyes. Oddly, she felt little fear at the prospect of facing Peter, only a dull sort of resignation. Sam's idea had been to tie her to something immovable, Kelly's big poster bed or one of the vertical beams in the basement, so that when Peter came he'd be unable to cause her to harm herself. But Kelly had refused. If she was to survive this night, she would have to do so on her own terms. To be free of Peter at last, she needed to face him alone. He had mentally raped her, brutally murdered the man she loved—and now she had to show him that her love for him was dead. From what Sam had told her, that seemed to be the key. The good love they'd shared as kids had festered in Peter's bitter heart for six years that must have crept by like centuries. And now he was insane, some kind of impossible killing machine with only one weakness.

  His feelings for her.

  She must show him her hate; she knew this instinctively. It might be the only way to stop him.

  He wasn't Peter Gardner anymore.

  Kelly shrieked and jumped back, her thoughts cut short. Something had shifted in the purple shadows of the porch. She'd caught the movement in the corner of her eye—a hunched, swift-moving shape. Now there was a crunch of dry snow, muted by the thickness of the glass. . . then Chainsaw poked his snout around the edge of the window frame. Head cocked, he regarded Kelly with soft brown eyes, eyes that seemed to say, "Come on, Kelly. Come out to play!"

  "Chainsaw," Kelly breathed, a little hysterically. "You silly mutt. How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me like that?"

  A smile twitched on her lips and the dog perked its ears. In a way, she was glad to see him out there. It was foolish, but his presence made her feel safer. She knew that if he could, Chainsaw would protect her, even at the cost of his life.

  But what could he do against a ghost?

  After a last winsome glance, Chainsaw turned away. She could hear him crunching back to the steps and then down. Not for the first time, Kelly thought of the irony of her relationship with the mutt. A little love—and the occasional can of Dr. Ballard's—and she had herself a pretty fearsome watchdog. Chainsaw patrolled the grounds around her place every night, while the house up the hill went unguarded. She wondered if the landlord could sue her for dognapping, and weren't these crazy thoughts to be having with Will only hours dead and some ungodly force about to try to kill her?

  A huge shadow vaulted into Kelly's line of sight from beyond the porch railing. It touched the railing briefly, then blurred toward the window.

  Chainsaw came through the glass in a shattering explosion. His forepaws struck Kelly's breasts and drove her to the floor. Her head struck the rug like a rock, and then the dog was at her throat, boring in, his carrion breath hot beneath her chin. His hind paws clawed at the rug between her legs, jerking him forward in short, killing jabs. Kelly opened her mouth to scream, but the musty reek of the shepherd's pelt reached down her throat and stifled it. She could feel his teeth against her skin, blunt knobs of hard enamel, probing for blood. Only the thick woolen neck of her sweater prevented him from goring out her windpipe in a dripping snarl of tendon, blood vessel, and cartilage.

  Kelly got her hands up between the dog's forelegs and tried to shove him off. The dog's keel-shaped chest heaved against her fingers, but he didn't yield.

  On the right side of her neck, where the dog's upper teeth dug and ground, Kelly felt the skin give way with an audible pop. Blood coursed over her shoulder in hot streamlets. With her bandaged hand she groped around her for a weapon, a pointed shard of glass, the bat she'd used on Sam, anything. . . but her fingers found only rug.

  There was another pop now, and more blood.

  "Peter!" Kelly screamed, and the dog faltered for a beat. "Peter, stop this!" Chainsaw lifted his head—

  Then he was boring in again, roaring, maddened by the sweet taste of blood. Kelly clutched the ruff beneath his jaw and tried to choke him, but it was like trying to choke a tree trunk.

  The dog was going to kill her.

  Kelly's clawed fingers plunged into something wet, a warm, lipless mouth in the dog's hairy neck. A cut! Kelly realized with a glee that bordered on insane. She could feel something pulsing against the backs of her fingers in there.

  There was a third pop of skin, and now she could feel the hard grit of teeth against bone. Her bone.

  With a primitive howl Kelly tore at the wound in Chainsaw's neck. The dog yelped in pain, but it did not back off. Kelly dragged down on the lip of the cut, trying to dig her nails into the pulsing cables inside. One of the dog's hind paws rammed her in the crotch, the nails poking through her jeans.

  But she continued to tear at the wound.

  The dog was shaking its head now, the way a puppy will shake an evening paper to shreds, trying to get a deeper purchase on her throat. She could see his eyes. They were scarlet.

  Her index finger hooked a hot, throbbing rope.

  She yanked.

  Blood surged out of Chainsaw's neck in dark, divergent streams, the pressure forceful enough to spatter the TV screen six feet behind them. His growls turned into grotesque wet gurglings and his hindquarters thudded to the floor—but still he tried to rip out her throat.

  With a tremendous heave Kelly rolled the dog off her chest. Chainsaw tumbled away, clambered to his feet, then collapsed in a twitching heap. That scarlet rage flashed in his eyes again, as Kelly backed away. Then he was looking up at her beseechingly, confused and mortally wounded.

  Overcome by a great rush of sorrow for the dog, Kelly fell to her knees at its side, unmindful of her own bleeding injuries.

  "Peter!" she screamed, throwing her head back, the blood like war paint on her face. "You dirty bastard, I hate you! Do you hear me? I hate you!"

  Chainsaw was whining now, licking Kelly's wrist, and a cold March wind blew in on them both. Sobbing, Kelly held the an
imal's head—

  And then scrambled back as the dog's bloodied pelt began to spit and crackle with profane electricity. Blue light streamed out of the shepherd's dying eyes in jagged, coalescing bolts that swirled and sizzled overhead.

  No, Peter said, and Kelly heard the word—inside, like a secret thought. You don't hate me, Kelly.

  You love me.

  And now you're going to prove it.

  He looked so peaceful. Peaceful and alive. His mouth was set in a ghost of a smile, and every few seconds the globes of his eyes flickered beneath their lids. It was as if he were only sleeping.

  Sam had been standing at Peter's bedside for about twenty minutes. The pillow felt impossibly heavy now, an anvil instead of a sac stuffed with feathers, and Sam couldn't lift it any higher than his belt.

  He felt paralyzed, like his brother.

  Standing there watching him sleep (no, not asleep, he's not asleep) Sam was reminded of when they were kids and Sam would sometimes have trouble nodding off in his saggy top bunk. When these times came, he would poke his head over the edge and look clown at his sleeping brother. He'd seemed like a god to Sam then, the five-year difference in their ages somehow vast and incomprehensible, and Sam remembered feeling safe with Peter so near. No one could harm him as long as Peter Gardner was his brother. He had wondered what Peter dreamed of on these nights, hoping that he was included but doubting it, imagining instead that Peter's dreams took him to wondrous and impossible places, all the places he told Sam about when they sat together beneath the droopy old willow by the creek, just the two of them, Peter spinning dreams, Sam sitting rapt and attentive. "Gonna fly right up to the moon someday, Sammy. Maybe even to Venus, who knows? Yeah. Be the first man on Venus, what do you think about that?" To Peter all things were possible, and it made Sam wonder how he'd put up with such a wimp of a kid brother.