Then the vision was gone, disappearing from his skull as quickly and unexpectedly as it had come. Milo moaned and dropped to his knees. His head ached uncomfortably and he could feel an egg rising on his forehead where it had impacted the chair. He looked across the room to see Rae Ann staring back at him fearfully. He ignored her.
He was confused and even a little scared. This was a vision totally different than anything he had ever experienced. In the normal ones, he observed random slices of other people’s lives, scenes with no emotions or value judgments attached to them. He had no feelings about them, they just were.
But in this vision, Milo had wanted nothing more than to destroy the young woman, to rip and rend and kill. And it was just the younger woman. The other two people who had appeared in the vision he couldn’t give a shit less about. He walked unsteadily into the bathroom, leaning over the hole where the toilet used to be, feeling like he was going to puke, but nothing came up. He rested his head lightly on the dirty floor.
Finally he stood again, exhausted. He had been extremely lucky in one way. If the vision had invaded—and that’s exactly what it felt like, an invasion—his brain a couple of minutes earlier, while his guest had been alone in the bathroom, she might have been able to rush past him and out the door as he struggled to avoid blacking out. She could have been down the stairs in seconds, screaming at the top of her lungs as soon as she hit the street. Even in this neighborhood, that scenario would have spelled the end for Milo Cain.
He looked at the bathroom wall, bare where a mirror used to be. Instead of his face staring back at him, Milo saw faded plaster with a hairline crack spidering diagonally toward the ceiling. That was probably for the best. He doubted he was looking too steady at the moment. He certainly didn’t feel steady.
Milo straightened slowly and returned to the living room. Rae Ann was watching him closely, the terror written on her features even more intensely now than at any time since he had brought her here.
Milo didn’t care. He continued to ignore her for the time being. She wasn’t going anywhere. He dragged himself to his air mattress and tumbled onto it. He was exhausted. He fell asleep and didn’t dream.
CHAPTER 19
Cait’s question hung in the air like an accusation. She supposed it probably was. Of all the things she had expected to hear from the woman who gave her up in an illegal adoption three decades ago, “You have a twin” had never even entered her mind. Yet there it was.
For a brief moment, she thought maybe she hadn’t heard the woman correctly. Maybe her mother had said something like, “Separating you from us was a sin,” not, “We had to separate you from your twin.” But that was patently ridiculous. The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop, and Virginia Ayers was sitting less than three feet away at the same table. Of course she had heard her mother correctly.
“I have a twin?” she repeated for the third time.
The woman sighed deeply, the sound filled with longing and regret and, it seemed to Cait, perhaps a touch of fear. “This is a mistake,” Virginia said, but before Cait could say a word in response, she disregarded her own statement and began telling the story Cait had waited her entire life to hear.
“As you’ve undoubtedly concluded, your family history is more than a little unusual. And yes,” she added hastily, sensing Cait’s impatience, “you heard me correctly. You have a twin. A brother, actually. He was born minutes after you.”
“A brother,” Cait said wonderingly. “Where is he?”
Virginia shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You gave him up, too? Why in God’s name would you do that?”
Tears welled in Virginia’s eyes and Kevin laid his hand gently on Cait’s arm. “Maybe you should let her tell the story in her own way,” he suggested. “I’m sure she’ll get to that when she’s ready.” Cait looked the distraught woman in the eyes and she nodded gratefully.
“Thank you,” she said. She took a shuddering breath and continued. “Incidences of twin births run throughout our family’s genealogy, as far back as can be traced. Lots of twins, twins born roughly two of every three generations; a statistically impossible number of twins. For many families, twin births are a burden due to the fact that they require twice as much food, twice as much clothing, twice as much attention, twice as much of everything. For a young family without a lot of money, having twins can be stressful and difficult—”
“You gave up your children because it might be difficult?” Cait interrupted. Kevin stroked her arm and she closed her mouth reluctantly. She could feel her face flush and her mouth was set in an angry line.
“No,” Virginia answered simply. “That’s not why we gave you up. I mention these issues as examples of the many problems faced by the typical family with twins. To provide a little perspective. For your father and me, the problem was a far different one.” She gazed into Cait’s eyes and Cait felt her mother reaching into her very soul.
“You can sense things, see things in your mind, can’t you?” Virginia asked suddenly, changing the subject, catching Cait off guard.
She blinked in surprise. “How—how did you know?”
“I know because I have the same gift. Or the same curse, depending upon how you look at it. I know because this gift, or this curse, has been passed down through our ancestry for generations. For hundreds of years, maybe thousands.
“If this gift is similar to my own—and I have no doubt it is—you receive occasional flashes of insight into the lives of the people around you, often trivial, meaningless things, always at random and always in the form of mental pictures or images.” She paused and looked at Cait, waiting for confirmation.
For a moment Cait simply stared, unable to speak, shocked into silence at the turn the conversation had taken. Then she nodded.
Virginia nodded back absently, lost in her thoughts, and continued. “You’ve been able to do this little parlor trick since your earliest days, it’s a part of your personality that you once questioned but have long since learned to live with. You usually ignore the mental pictures—”
“Flickers,” Cait interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“Those mental pictures. I call them Flickers.”
“Flickers,” Virginia responded, pronouncing the word slowly, trying it out, rolling it around on her tongue, savoring it like a coffee aficionado might savor a particularly flavorful sip of dark roast. “I like it. It fits. Anyway, as I was saying, you usually ignore these ‘Flickers,’ as most of the time they mean nothing. Occasionally, however, you will receive a Flicker of significance. When that happens, you will attempt to put the mental image to use to help someone, to do a good deed, the clairvoyant’s version of helping an old lady across the street.”
Cait nodded again, unconsciously this time, as she flashed back to the elderly woman at the grocery store who had dropped her checkbook on her kitchen floor. She looked up to see Virginia Ayers—her mother—watching her with a tiny smile on her face. The smile seemed out of place; the rest of her face looked as though she might break into tears again at any moment. “I’ve always been curious about my ability,” Cait said, “about whether it was a genetic thing or if I was just some weird freak of nature. But you’re right about one thing: for the most part, I don’t give the Flickers a whole lot of thought anymore.”
“Now that you know you are not alone, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that your twin brother possesses the same ability. He also receives these Flickers, as you call them.”
“How do you know that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if you gave my brother and me up as newborns, how could you possibly know he has the ability as well? Have you been keeping track of him? Do you know where he is? Can I see him?”
Virginia shook her head firmly. “No, honey, it’s nothing like that. Your father and I did surrender both of you as infants. You were only hours old when you disappeared out of our lives forever.
Or so I thought, until I heard from that private detective down in Tampa.”
“Then, how? How do you know?”
“Because that’s the way it works with twins in this bloodline. It’s the root of the whole problem. There is no doubt that your brother had—has—the same ability as you. It’s why we had no choice but to give you up in an illegal adoption, surrendering you to a group that promised to place the two of you as far apart geographically as possible. It was the only way we could think of to keep you safe, to give you any chance of having a normal life. Or a life, period.”
Cait shrugged, bewildered. “We had to be taken from our parents and placed hundreds, maybe thousands of miles apart simply because we both had the ability to receive Flickers? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense because you don’t know the whole story.”
“Then tell me the whole story.”
Virginia stared at the surface of the small table and took a delicate sip of tea. Cait’s tea sat in front of her, forgotten. Finally the older woman shook her head, a tiny movement filled with resignation and defeat. “I suppose there’s no stopping you. As you said yourself, the genie is out of the bottle now, isn’t it?”
“If you’re asking whether I plan to forget about the fact that I have a twin brother and stop digging into this family’s supposedly mysterious past, if that’s what you’re asking, then no, there’s no stopping me.”
“I didn’t think so,” Virginia said, and placed her teacup onto the table with a clatter. Cait looked down and saw the woman’s hand shaking as if palsied. She tried to recall if it had been doing that earlier and could not. “Then I suppose there’s not much point beating around the bush.”
“None.”
“All right. We gave up our only children in an illegal adoption as the only means of protecting you from your twin brother. Had we not done so, you would be long dead by now. He would have murdered you years ago.”
CHAPTER 20
Milo awoke from his nap feeling groggy, tossing and turning on his air mattress before finally abandoning the idea of sleep and rising bleary-eyed and exhausted. It had been a couple of hours since the disturbingly strong vision of…whatever the hell it had been…had knocked him on his ass like never before.
He sat up, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, and glanced toward the middle of the room where his terrified houseguest remained securely fastened to her chair. From this angle Milo couldn’t be sure, but the hooker appeared to be dozing. Her head tilted forward as if her chin was resting on her breastbone and she sat unmoving.
He rolled off the mattress and stood, and Rae Ann snapped awake at the sound of the old floorboards creaking underfoot. She shook her head once as if to clear the cobwebs and then looked around, obviously trying to locate her captor. Milo smiled. “I’m behind you,” he said playfully, “so you can’t see me.” She whimpered into her duct-tape gag and he stepped into her field of view.
The entire day’s schedule had been thrown off by the earlier unplanned interruption, that disturbingly strong vision of the three people sitting around a kitchen table. He stretched, trying to choose between eating breakfast—it was so late now, he supposed, that it could more appropriately be described as lunch—or getting on with the day’s entertainment.
Entertainment won out. Sure, he was hungry, but he could eat anytime. His chances to play with a fresh victim were distressingly infrequent. He gazed down at the schoolgirl hooker appraisingly and saw her staring back at him with eyes wide and fearful. In the harsh light of midday, after the first round of play last night and without an opportunity to shower or apply makeup, the girl didn’t look quite so youthful after all—certainly not an age to justify her ridiculous outfit. Streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks like tiny canals and traces of crow’s feet were beginning to radiate outward from her blue eyes.
Milo didn’t care. She was still relatively young and sexy and, best of all, she was his. His to use in the manner of his choosing for as long as he elected to do so, before tossing her corpse into a Dumpster when the pleasure he received from torturing her was no longer worth the effort of keeping her alive. He smiled and instantly the girl began thrashing about in her chair, her efforts pointless but enthusiastic, somehow apparently tipped off to his intentions solely by the look in his eyes.
He watched her struggle, aroused by her reaction, his predator eyes locked onto her body, determined not to miss a moment of the fun. Eventually she tired and slumped back, her slim form shaking either from exertion or fear. Milo wasn’t sure which and didn’t care. She had graduated from whimpering to moaning, the sounds still muffled by the thick silver duct tape layered over her mouth. He wished he could remove the gag to fully enjoy her terror, but unfortunately, even in this neighborhood, the screams she would immediately unleash would not go unnoticed.
It was a damned shame. Furthermore, it was completely unfair. Milo had found her and lured her here fair and square; he should be permitted the luxury of enjoying her in whatever manner he pleased. He sighed deeply. Someday he would get his own home way out in the country, a place with no pesky neighbors, a place where not only could he play with his victims without having to gag them, he could hook them up to a loudspeaker if he wanted to and still not have to worry. In the meantime, he would make do with what he had. No one ever said life would be easy.
Or fair.
Now, on to the business at hand. How did he want to play today? He fingered the pliers in his pocket and came to a quick decision. It wasn’t all that difficult. “What do you say we take a look at those fingers you injured last night? Maybe I can fix them up for you.”
“Mmmph mmmph mmmph mmmmmph,” Rae Ann replied, resuming her impressive routine of head-shaking and body-thrashing. It occurred to Milo that his little deception had not fooled her. She knew she was in for pain. There just wasn’t anything she could do about it.
He displayed his pliers for her with a flourish, holding them in front of her eyes, which she had squeezed tightly shut as though she might be able to make the whole nightmare disappear. Eventually, though, Milo knew she would become curious and reopen them, and eventually she did. The terror in them blossomed at the sight of the small hand tool.
The pliers seemed relatively benign to Milo, grey steel pincers with curved handles covered in red rubberized plastic for a firm grip. Rae Ann didn’t see them as benign, though, probably thanks to her slightly different perspective. She was clearly terrified.
In a quick motion, he fell to his knees in front of his guest. To anyone entering the shabby apartment at that exact moment, he might have looked like a nervous suitor proposing marriage to his young girlfriend. Except, of course, that the bride-to-be had been duct-taped to her chair and blood was dripping steadily from three ruined fingers. But no one walked into the apartment. Milo reached forward, grabbing Rae Ann’s badly injured right hand with his left, holding it steady, waiting patiently for her to calm down.
She never did, and when he got tired of waiting, Milo opened the jaws of the pliers as widely as he could, placed the tempered steel between the first and second knuckles of her swollen pinky finger, and deftly twisted his wrist, snapping the delicate bone with an audible and satisfying Crack! She screamed in agony, the sound muffled almost to the point of inaudibility. Milo removed the pliers and the tip of the finger tilted at nearly a ninety-degree angle, pointing toward the floor, blood dripping more steadily now onto the makeshift plastic tarp.
Rae Ann continued to scream into her gag; she was panting and hyperventilating, and Milo came in his pants without even touching himself. He never tired of the sexual gratification he received from the suffering of his guests. He knew this made him different from most, but was bothered by that fact only inasmuch as it wasn’t always easy to avail himself of a young girl to torture. And now that he had one, he certainly wasn’t about to let her go to waste.
After maybe thirty seconds of what must have been some of the most intense pain
the young woman had ever endured—although it was nothing compared to what Milo had in store for her—Rae Ann passed out, her head slumping to the side, her face streaked with tears and snot and drool. It was disgusting
Milo didn’t care. He rose from the floor and went into the bathroom to clean himself up with a dirty towel.
* * *
The girl was still unconscious when he came out of the bathroom, so Milo sat on the floor with his back against the wall, watching her and thinking about nothing in particular while waiting for her to wake up so they could have more fun together. She looked so peaceful, nothing like the panicked animal she had been prior to blacking out.
His mind wandered back to the mysterious vision he had experienced earlier in the morning. He was certain he had never seen the young woman from that vision before and wondered why she had inspired such a vile, hate-filled reaction, the intensity of which still surprised and troubled him. As an antisocial personality, undoubtedly diagnosable as a sociopath—Milo Cain had issues with mental stability, he knew that, but he wasn’t stupid—he was used to viewing the world through a lens of anger and mistrust, but his reaction to the girl in the vision had been off the charts, even for him.
What did that mean? Even now, sitting here recalling the vision, he could feel the hate bubbling up inside him like a rapidly filling well, causing his pulse to race and his breathing to quicken. Even now, hours later, the mere thought of the bitch—it was only the young woman, the other two people in the room inspired nothing more in him than his usual disgust and loathing—caused a blackness to fill his already-corrupted soul and thoughts of murder and mayhem to swell in his consciousness, almost to the exclusion of everything else.
The girl in the vision was young and pretty, roughly his own age, and she radiated goodness and decency, two things he hated, despite the fact he wished he could have them. But it was more than that. There were plenty of people, even in his shabby orbit, who were good and decent and who didn’t make him feel as though he wanted to rip them apart with his bare hands, who didn’t inspire this single-minded desire to rend and destroy and kill.
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