Mr. Midnight

by Allan Leverone

  She was on the floor, she was flat on her back on the floor and she began scrabbling backward down the hallway in an attempt to buy some time, she needed to buy enough time to reach into the pocket of her sweater and pull out her gun, the one she had hidden away in her pocket. It was a little Smith & Wesson Model 40 handgun that she had owned for decades and had never used but had kept for protection because sometimes Everett could get a little dangerous and you could never tell when you might need to defend yourself.

  She scuttled backward, trying to open up a little room between herself and this young man who had barged into her home with bad intent written all over his face. He wanted to hurt her, she could tell he wanted to hurt her and somehow she knew he wanted more than that. He wanted to hurt the daughter she had just met for the first time in thirty years, she knew that, too, and she was not going to allow it to happen. She would crab-walk away from him and then she would pull the gun out of her pocket and hold it on him, she would hold it on him to stop him from doing whatever he was planning on doing and then she would call the police and—

  —and she slammed into the hallway wall with her back. She slammed into the wall because after all it had been half a century since she had crab-walked and what had seemed natural and easy when she was ten years old wasn’t quite so natural or easy anymore. She slammed into the wall and the impact jarred the little S&W out of her pocket and the intruder saw it on the floor and his eyes widened in surprise. She reached out and grabbed the gun and flicked off the safety and prepared to blast him to hell, but he wound up and kicked it before she had a chance to pull the trigger. He kicked it and it skittered away across the floor and into the living room where it disappeared under…it disappeared under…it disappeared under…

  And then Cait understood.

  Despite her near-unconsciousness and her wooziness and the fire burning in her arm and her fear of Milo and what he was doing to her, despite all of it, she finally understood. The Flicker disappeared, vanishing from her head like the popping of a soap bubble in bathwater.

  She understood it all with a clarity that bordered on mystical. It wasn’t a typical Flicker she had been fighting off all afternoon. Typical Flickers were random and held absolutely no meaning most of the time. They were pointless snippets of people’s lives.

  This had been different. Cait realized now that this Flicker had come from Victoria purposely, it was something she had been trying desperately to force into her daughter’s brain because it was something she needed her to see, but in Cait’s determination to concentrate fully on fighting off the monster that was her brother Milo, she had forced it away, time after time.

  But now she understood. She understood Victoria’s desperation. Because when the monster had seen the gun fall out of Victoria’s sweater pocket and had kicked it away, it had sailed down the hallway and skittered into the living room, eventually coming to rest under the couch.

  This couch.

  The couch currently serving as Cait Connelly’s combination prison/torture chamber.

  And Victoria had remembered.

  Far off in the distance, Cait heard an explosion and felt the house shake. She wondered if it had been hit by lightning, or whether perhaps an airplane bound for nearby Logan International Airport had fallen out of the sky and crash-landed on it. She waited for her life to be snuffed out like some insignificant bug’s from the airplane explosion but when nothing happened, she snaked her left hand underneath the couch, feeling around on the floor with the back of her hand for the gun, for the little Smith & Wesson revolver waiting patiently to be found.

  And against all odds she found it. Her knuckles brushed the cold steel plating of the gun and pushed it a little farther away on the varnished floor and Cait, incredibly, chuckled. It would be the very definition of irony, she thought, to find the gun, the object of her salvation, only to push it out of reach before being able to use it.

  But it wasn’t out of reach. She strained and stretched, doing her best to ignore the horrible fiery pain in her right arm, the arm Milo had skinned from wrist to elbow, and when her hand brushed that cold steel plating again she wrapped her long, delicate fingers around it like a drowning swimmer grasping a life vest.

  She secured the gun in her hand and then, with the advancing form of her attacker approaching rapidly in her peripheral vision, pulled it out from under the couch and curled her hand under her breast and closed her eyes just as he skidded to a stop in front of her. She hoped the pistol was hidden from his view by the angle of her body but could not be sure.

  There was noise and what sounded like an approaching army and Cait realized the crash that had jarred her awake moments ago was not an airplane falling from the sky onto Victoria’s house, it was the police breaching the door and coming, finally coming, to rescue her and Victoria and Kevin.

  But they were too late, despite the fact that they were in the house, or at least about to be in the house. She risked opening an eye and when she did, she saw Milo, the man who had begun torturing her and was going to continue torturing her until she was dead—it was all true, everything her mother had told her this morning about Flickers and her bloody family history of twin murdering twin was all true—standing right above her, not two feet away.

  In his hand he held the knife he had used to peel her skin from her bones, only this time he was not going to use it merely to torture her and cause intense pain. This time he was going to use it to slit her throat. He leaned down, thinking she was unconscious, and swiveled his wrist and brought the knife blade forward and—

  —and Cait swiveled her own hand, her left hand, the hand holding her mother’s snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver. She pulled the weapon out from under her body and she pointed it at Milo’s face and suddenly everything ground to a halt. The sounds of the police forcing their way into the house faded away to nothing and somehow Cait’s fear did the same. She was no longer a helpless victim, no longer cowering in fear against an attacker with intentions she could not comprehend.

  Milo froze, the lethal knife poised inches away from the delicate, tender skin of Cait’s throat. And for seconds that seemed to stretch into hours, nothing happened and nobody moved. This nightmare day had come down to a deadly standoff.

  Cait spoke, her voice somehow strong and steady despite the pain hammering her right arm and the adrenaline coursing through her body. “It doesn’t have to end like this. It doesn’t have to end at all,” she said, and for an instant she saw regret and longing share space with the madness in her twin’s eyes.

  But only for an instant. Then it was gone, replaced by a cold hard calculating shrewdness, and Cait knew it was over.

  He opened his mouth as if to speak but no words came out. And then he half-smiled and lunged with the knife and Cait felt the tip of the blade gash the side of her neck just under her ear, and she expected more white-hot pain, but there was no pain, there was nothing at all, just an emptiness she knew she would never be able to fill.

  And she pulled the trigger.

  The Smith & Wesson roared in her hand and she watched with a kind of numb, horrified fascination as a gaping wound opened on the side of her brother’s head. A red mist appeared like a halo around his skull and she wanted to close her eyes but could not.

  Mr. Midnight wavered over her, swaying like a skyscraper in a hurricane, his hand still grasping the knife he had used to carve and slice her flesh. His eyes were absurdly large and he furrowed his brow as if he could not quite comprehend what had just happened.

  He lifted the knife again in his now-trembling hand and began to lunge forward and she pulled the trigger a second time. More blood spurted from her brother’s head and this time he fell. The knife clattered to the floor and her brother’s eyes glazed over and then he dropped straight down and lay still. Cait dropped the gun like it had given her an electric shock and it thudded to the floor next to her injured arm.

  And of course at that moment the police rescue team flew around the corner, four men d
ressed in fatigues and body armor, guns drawn, entering the room prepared to do battle. The men skidded to a stop directly in front of the murdered police officer’s prone body. Their weapons swept side to side as they covered the room, alert for any threat.

  Cait’s eyes began to blur, either from pain or shock or the tears welling up in her eyes as a result of the horrible knowledge she had just killed a man. And not just any man, a blood relative. And not just any blood relative, her own brother. Her own twin.

  Her vision wavered and she fought to stay awake.

  Her arm burned and she fought to stay awake.

  The law-enforcement team stood motionless in the doorway, taking in the scene, seemingly shocked into inaction by the devastation in the room. One of the officers spied Cait’s mangled arm, a strip of skin stretching outward from her elbow across the floor, and retched. He clapped a hand to his mouth and looked away.

  Cait tried to tell them to get help for Kevin, that he was gravely injured and needed medical attention immediately, and all that came out was a pathetic little croak. She swallowed. Tried unsuccessfully to force some saliva into her throat. Opened her mouth to try again.

  At that moment the men in the fatigues and body armor sprang into action, one of them moving quickly to secure the Smith & Wesson, another stepping over the dead cop to assess the condition of Kevin and Victoria, and a third to check Milo’s unmoving body for a pulse. Cait wondered why he would do that; she couldn’t imagine anyone being alive with two bullets fired from almost point-blank range into his head.

  The officer who had picked up the gun bent over her. It was the same man who had nearly thrown up at the sight of her arm, and he trained his eyes on hers, steadfastly avoiding looking at the oozing red mess that used to be her forearm.

  Cait opened her mouth to say something to him and without warning he disappeared. Everything disappeared. She fell away into a warm, dark hole where it was safe and comfortable and no one tried to peel the skin from her bones with a knife.

  CHAPTER 53

  The water of Tampa Bay shimmered in the distance, a deep teal blue as sunlight glinted off the tops of the waves. Salsa music drifted across the beach from a radio playing somewhere to Cait’s right, lively and enthusiastic but soft as an afterthought. Cait’s eyes were closed and she felt warm and drowsy, but still she caught bits and pieces of conversations, some in English and some in Spanish, as groups of people passed her beach chair, all chattering and laughing and enjoying the tropical Florida heat.

  Her right arm sweated and itched incessantly. Surgeons had performed skin grafts to repair the damage done to the arm and had then covered it in antibiotic dressing before wrapping the whole thing in swaths of bandages, all of which needed to be cleaned and changed daily.

  Cait wasn’t about to complain, though. The doctors had said there was no structural damage and thus every reason to believe she would regain full use of the arm, although it would always look a little…off, with discolored skin from the grafts and small scars crisscrossing it like a road map. She considered herself incredibly, unbelievably fortunate not to have died an agonizing death in that tiny house in Everett, Massachusetts.

  Every few seconds she opened her eyes, squinting against the hazy brightness, reassuring herself she really was still sitting on the beach in Florida. She reached out to touch her mother’s arm. Received a comforting squeeze in return.

  She sighed tiredly. The worst part, now that the ordeal had ended, was her inability to get anything close to a good night’s sleep. Every night was the same: she would begin drifting off to sleep and the crippling fear would strike, the terrifying certainty that Milo Cain was lurking at the foot of her bed, knife in hand, waiting to begin peeling back her skin once more.

  The psychologist said it was a natural reaction; that it was to be expected and would begin to fade over time—the trauma was only a couple of weeks old, after all—but Cait wondered whether that was true. The psychologist hadn’t been in that house, hadn’t gone under the knife with no anesthesia. The psychologist didn’t understand. Not really.

  But Virginia understood, and that was why, no matter how many times Cait reached over in the warm Tampa sunshine to make physical contact, no matter how many times she started a seemingly normal conversation about the weather, or where to eat lunch, only to dissolve into tears for no apparent reason, her mother never complained. She never told Cait to buck up, or to be strong, or to tough it out because tomorrow was another day; she never once said any of those things.

  Because Virginia understood.

  Virginia told Cait that watching while her newfound daughter, her own flesh and blood, was carved up by her newfound son, also her own flesh and blood, while bound and helpless, tied to a chair in her own living room, was the worst thing she had ever experienced in a life that had seen more than its share of bad experiences.

  Cait reached over once again and stroked her mother’s arm and mumbled, “Tell me again.”

  And Virginia understood.

  “Well, let’s see,” she said amiably, as if sharing her recipe for lemon meringue pie. “You were conscious when the police SWAT team came charging into the room. That was right after you shot Milo.” She said it matter-of-factly, like it was no big deal. But Cait knew better.

  She swallowed hard and nodded. She did not look at her mother or even open her eyes aside from her almost unconscious little blinking motion every few seconds to assure herself she was still on the beach. She didn’t like thinking about that afternoon two weeks ago but couldn’t stop. And hearing her mother tell the story was cathartic. She had asked Virginia to tell it dozens of times over the past two weeks.

  “After you passed out,” Virginia continued, “the policemen split up, one checking Milo to be sure he was no longer a threat—as if there could be any doubt, after taking two .38 slugs in the head, one of them through his eye—another freeing me from the chair, and an officer each tending to you and Kevin.”

  “Tell me about Kevin,” Cait said, certain Virginia had known the request was coming. It was the same every time.

  “Kevin had lost a lot of blood and the stab wound had punctured a lung, the blade passing ever-so-close to his heart. In fact, the young man who checked him out couldn’t find a pulse and told his partners that Kevin was already dead. Needless to say, the medical personnel were inside the house the second the SWAT team radioed that it was clear. They stabilized you and then wheeled everyone out to waiting ambulances. That was the last time I saw Kevin.”

  Tears filled Cait’s eyes as they always did at this point in the story. It was like she was watching a horror movie where she knew every plot twist and every line of dialogue by heart, but still could not keep from screaming when the boogeyman jumped out of the closet. She hadn’t even managed to stay conscious to see her fiancé wheeled out on a stretcher after he had sacrificed everything in his failed attempt to save them.

  “The last time you saw him,” Cait repeated wonderingly.

  “You mean the last time until after the surgery,” a voice boomed from behind them, startling Cait and causing her to jump. She swiveled in her beach chair and drank in the sight of her boyfriend, his chest still swaddled in bandages covered by a light T-shirt. He looked ridiculous among all the tanned, shirtless surfer dudes dotting the beach, but also looked more desirable to Cait than all of them put together.

  Kevin took in the look on her face and chuckled. He handed Virginia a lavender-colored frozen drink in a big plastic cup with a tiny umbrella sticking out the top before easing into a beach chair next to Cait with a satisfied sigh. “I’m telling you,” he said to her, “you really need to try these frozen pina coladas. They’re unbelievable.”

  “I’ll pass,” she said. “I don’t want to get drunk. I want to stay sober so I can look at you with clear eyes.”

  Kevin laughed. “To each his own. But I think Virginia is being a little overdramatic. It’s not like I was that close to death. I just chose an inopportune time to take
a little nap, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, right,” Cait shot back. “I’ve heard this story a hundred times and I’ve talked to the doctors. They said if the rescue had taken five minutes longer, you would have died right there in the chair, so don’t give me that macho male crap!” She smiled as she said it, still amazed at their incredible good fortune.

  Cait knew she had lost a lot on that couch—shooting her brother less than twenty-four hours after learning of his existence had opened a hole in her heart that would never completely heal—but she knew also she had had no choice in the matter, that Milo Cain had been irreparably broken and would not have stopped until everyone inside the house was dead, and that made all the difference in the world.

  She felt sadness for what she had done but no guilt.

  And while the sadness of losing her brother might never disappear, Cait understood she had gained something as well: a mother who would now be in her life forever. Virginia had already made plans to sell the house in Everett and move to Tampa permanently, and was on her way to becoming friends not just with Kevin, but with Cait’s adoptive mother as well.

  Milo had miraculously survived the shooting despite the delay in receiving medical attention, but was presently hospitalized and in a coma, and would require months of convalescence, maybe years. In any event, according to the Suffolk County district attorney, he would never see the outside of a prison again. The full extent of Mr. Midnight’s crimes, of his horrific brutality, was only beginning to be uncovered, and the D.A. assured Virginia and Cait that there was already more than enough evidence to keep Milo under lock and key for the rest of his life.

  Cait blinked and smiled at Kevin. She squeezed her mother’s hand. “You know what? I’ve changed my mind. Maybe I’ll have that drink after all.”

  EPILOGUE