Knack (Benjamin Brown Book 1)

by Tom Twitchel

  That didn’t seem possible. “Germany? But how old would she have been? You left in the late forties.” My mind lurched with a stunning thought that should have occurred to me before. “How old are you?”

  “Ah, and there’s the rub. Benny, I’m over a hundred years old and so is…Miss Hoch.”

  Stunned, I grappled with that concept. Mr. Goodturn looked old but not truly anywhere close to a hundred. Miss Hoch hadn’t looked even close to forty; in fact, she had seemed younger than the first time I’d met her, and more…sensual.

  “How is that possible?”

  “My knack. I slow things down. My knack naturally slows me down too. I age much slower than most people do. I’m getting older at a different rate, but I have no direct control over it. She, on the other hand, cannot only slow down the aging process, but she can reverse it. She has only two knacks, but one is lethal. She can sense knacks in others and absorb them. Her knack transmutes what she drains from her victims, and channels it into energy that improves her health. It makes her young, keeps her young. It doesn’t permanently stop the aging process though. To stay young, she needs to prey on others. The stronger the knack is that she takes, the more energy she absorbs. The ugliest facet of her knack is that when she takes energy from someone, steals their knack, it empties them. There is nothing left, no memories, no will and no desire to live. And the act of draining them works on her like a narcotic. It is extremely addictive. Her addiction to taking in this manner and her ability to sense a person’s knack is literally intoxicating to her. Like liquor to a drunk, drugs to an addict. Your number of gifts gives you a very strong presence. To her, it is almost like smelling you.”

  I remembered her reference to smelling me. The whole conversation didn’t border on bizarre, it was all bizarre. “You said…you told Oso that you had “fixed” her before. Why? When did that happen? When she came into the pawnshop?”

  Standing up, he took off his coat and folded it. He placed it behind him on the recliner so that he wouldn’t scoot too far back. He had been wearing a vest and a business shirt underneath it. Not his usual t-shirt and suspenders. It made him look older. He settled back into the chair.

  “I have actually “fixed” her on three separate occasions, including today. Although “fix” certainly doesn’t seem appropriate since my ministrations haven’t remained stable. The first time I tried to change her memory and prevent her from harming others was over sixty-five years ago before she followed me here from Germany. Undoubtedly, she was hoping to steal my knacks, which I must confess, despite what I told you when we first discussed them, are as varied and as strong as yours. She wasn’t as experienced at it then and she was brazen, arrogant. I had no trouble protecting myself.”

  My stomach churned as I thought about drowning in that pool of purple. “How does she take the knacks? What does she do?”

  He shook himself and continued. “It’s very painful. Her knack isn’t precise. It’s akin to slicing butter with a chainsaw. All she really wants is to absorb the knack but to do that she empties her victim’s mind. There’s nothing left. Just the shell of the person. There aren’t any marks, no signs of physical trauma. just a person who isn’t a person anymore. No memories, no thoughts and no possible way to recover.”

  “So when was the second time you…fixed her? How did you know she was close by?” I asked.

  “The second time is when she came into my shop looking for you. I recognized her immediately and, in fact, had been preparing for her. I knew someone had been tracking naturals. Someone had been sending men into my shop to try to take me by force—kidnap me. They all had low-level knacks. No ability to manifest but possessing strong intuition, which had led them to me. It was a simple thing to thwart their attempts. I defended myself and placed heavy restrictions in their minds to protect others and myself. You and your friends witnessed one such attempt. I was unable to determine who was behind the attacks, but several stories popped up in the papers. People were being found on the street in a state of confusion, unresponsive and lacking control over their physical motor functions. I visited one of them in the hospital, and I recognized him as one of the men who had confronted me in my shop. The changes I had introduced in his mind wouldn’t have caused his degenerative state. I’d seen it before. That’s when I knew it was Sonja, that she had followed me here to Seattle. She had shaken off my meddling. She was hunting again, but she was craftier. She was using others to bring her victims to her.”

  My head was spinning. How could all of this be true? And I was having trouble following why Miss Hoch had been essentially wasting her own troops.

  “Why would she… Why was she…making them sick?” I stammered.

  “Her hunters only had limited value to her. I assume that if they had worked with her too long or proved unsuccessful, she took their knacks. They had probably been operating as independent bounty hunters, finding targets for her and then bringing them to her for a price. She didn’t know where the victims were plucked from, just whether they possessed enough of a knack to feed on. When she disposed of unsuccessful hunters it covered her tracks as far as the authorities were concerned, but not me. I had seen people die from her parasitic siphoning before. I knew what it looked like. Lord knows what happened to all of the poor souls that were brought to her. They may have been disposed of in more…complete ways.”

  I swallowed hard. Baffle’s Internet research had been following the aftermath of attacks carried out by someone we hadn’t suspected. The people who had died were victims of Miss Hoch.

  The danger I had been in earlier rushed into my mind. My headache was better, but I felt shaky and sick for an entirely different reason. Oso had saved my life—twice. I had been seconds from ending up like those people in the hospital.

  Wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, Mr. Goodturn sighed again. The story he was sharing with me was very hard on him. Did he feel responsible?

  “When she came into my shop intending to ask about you, it was the first time I had seen her face-to-face in decades. I recognized her instantly. She didn’t remember me. That part of the changes I had introduced in her mind had remained intact. Her hunters must have located me without her help. She could tell what I possessed, but it was a surprise to her. Her hunters hadn’t told her about me, but she immediately sensed what I possessed. The fact that I recognized her first was the only thing that saved me. Before she could affect me with her knack, I stopped her and slowed her. I redacted all memory of you, her trip into my shop and constructed new memories. I created an impulse that led her to resign from her job and take on a new vocation; one that wouldn’t bring her into contact with children.”

  Thinking back to the first time I had met her, I shivered. She had probably been planning to harvest me from the moment she met me.

  Mr. Goodturn bowed his head and his shoulders were slumped. Fatigue and sadness came off him in waves. When he looked up, I saw the pain in his eyes.

  “What are we going to do Mr. Goodturn? What if she remembers again? What if she finds us again?”

  “I may need to be more aggressive in my approach. The way I have been trying to address this hasn’t been working. I was in a hurry to get you out of that alley,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse with emotion. “Not seeing her for so long, I believed I had found a way to protect others from her and to save her from herself.”

  There was something I couldn’t understand, a missing piece. “Why though? Why just try to…fix her? She’s killed people.”

  When he looked up, his chin was trembling and tears leaked out of the corners if his eyes.

  “Because she was my wife, Benny. God help me. I couldn’t hurt her because I love her, no matter what she is.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Trying to get my mind around the bomb that Mr. Goodturn had just dropped took a few minutes. He could see I was having a hard time digesting what he had said. His wife? I guess that could be possible based on what he had told me about their age-defying capabi
lities.

  “Is it my height, Benny?” he asked me.

  “Your height?”

  “When I tell people I was married, I think they immediately envision a woman of my size as opposed to someone of normal height.” A sad smile played on his lips.

  Maybe that had been it, but there was something else. “You told me that your wife was dead. Plus, she’s so much younger. I’m having a hard time accepting that.”

  He took his glasses off and wiped them with his handkerchief. “Yes, I did say that. Because the reality is…my wife is dead. Sonja ceased being the woman I fell in love with a long time ago.”

  “What happened? Why did you get divorced?” I asked.

  Readjusting his position on the chair, he scooted back, his feet dangling over the edge. “I never divorced her. At first I was deluded enough to think that she would come back. Later, it just wasn’t practical.”

  “So, you’re still married to…her?” The circumstances surrounding the connections between the people I had met in Seattle were boggling my tired mind.

  “Unfortunately. She left me when the business partnership failed. That was when we lived in Berlin. I had believed that her motivation was the loss of the business and that she couldn’t cope with the change in our financial situation. But that wasn’t the case at all. When we married, she knew about my knacks, but she hadn’t discovered her own yet. She had led a sheltered life and the…pressures that help a knack to manifest hadn’t occurred. Our financial distress, we lost our home, pushed her emotions to the brink, and over the edge. She didn’t share her discovery with me. It frightened her, and she didn’t understand it. She left me because she thought she was going insane. And in a way, perhaps she was.”

  “Then how did you figure out her ability?” I asked.

  “My ex-partner. Months after Sonja and I had separated, she met with him at a brew house. Why they were there, I don’t know. Perhaps by chance, maybe by design. Apparently, my partner had a low-level knack, strong intuitive skills. The amazing foresight he’d shown as he managed our finances had been a product of his knack. He probably didn’t even know it himself. When I found them, Sonja had taken him into an alley just like you. He had probably thought they were going to have a romantic rendezvous. She had already taken his knack when I discovered them. Crying hysterically, she told me what she had done. Through her tears, she told me about her curse and how she had been struggling with it. She said that her knack had overwhelmed her and she had taken him before she actually knew what she was doing. At least that’s what she told me. Who can say? Only she knows the truth. Despite her emotional state, she looked vibrant and healthy. Her ability was so raw, and its nature was so destructive that she had emptied him like a water pitcher. He was a mindless husk.”

  I remembered details of Baffle’s research. “Didn’t he die in a car accident?” I blurted out.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Ah, someone has been looking into the past I see. No matter. Yes, he did. At the moment I found them my first concern had been Sonja. She was inconsolable. She was on her knees in the filth of the alley and I was trying to quiet her and get her to her feet. By the time, I realized that Dolph had staggered out of the alley, it was too late. I turned to look for him just as he stepped out into traffic. The driver never even slowed down. The investigation that followed focused on me as being the driver of the car. The authorities cleared me, but my reputation was ruined. The manager at the repair shop didn’t like all of the attention the investigation brought to his shop and I lost my job. My job being taken away for a second time because of Dolph seemed more than a little ironic.”

  That his old partner had died in the same fashion that Maddy and I had fretted over so many months ago was mind-wrenching. And Mr. Goodturn blamed for the death? That didn’t seem fair, but how fair was life in 1940s Germany? “What happened then? You said she eventually came after you.”

  “Yes. That night I pleaded with her to come back to my apartment with me, but she refused. I lost contact with her even though I searched constantly. Months later, I ran into her or thought I had chanced upon her. It had probably all been orchestrated by her. The country was in the midst of a depression, the war was over, but Germany was a mess. Jobs were scarce and businesses struggled to survive. People struggled to get through each day. I had managed to secure employment and was enjoying a drink with friends when I saw her. When I approached her, I feared she would reject me again, but she was glad to see me—overjoyed. That and her youthful appearance should have warned me, but I was too happy to question what was happening.”

  I watched him while he told me the story. He shrugged his shoulders and sighed repeatedly. It was like watching someone engaged in heavy work.

  “She tried to take me into an alley—an alley—the same setting we had been in the last time I had seen her. All I could think of later was that she was either so far gone that she didn’t remember or that she had used that method so often that she didn’t realize that it gave her away. I was able to stop her before she could even attempt it.”

  He wiped his glasses again and I could see that his cheeks were wet. He didn’t bother to dry his face. I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt him; I was trembling with the thought of my own trip into an alley with her.

  Placing his glasses back on his nose, he continued. “I took her back to my apartment. I kept her there for a day and finally decided that to protect others from her I needed to act. Her memories were easy to change. Blocking her knack, her craving, was more difficult and it would appear that ultimately I failed in that regard. Perhaps it was akin to attempting to train a bear to no longer enjoy meat. I kept her slowed down, took her back to her cottage and left her there. I sailed for the United States a few days later to begin a new life. It was becoming obvious to others that I aged slowly and I was beginning to worry about explaining why.”

  “Mr. Goodturn, I’m so sorry.” I could feel his grief like a fresh wound. I didn’t need my knack to know what he was feeling.

  A shuddering laugh tumbled out of his throat. “Thank you, Benjamin. Even though so much time has passed, I still miss her, at least the memory of her. When I met her, she was the first for me—my only. I had never dated before and I have never been with another woman since. We were inseparable and I constantly marveled as to why she had chosen me. She doted on me and I on her. When we were together, it was as though no one else existed. When we were away from each other, it was like missing a piece of myself. Today’s events though…I think it’s clear that my Sonja is gone. I need to let go. And we need to plan how to deal with her in a more definitive way. She’s become like a wild creature. My work on her, when your friend Oso and I rescued you, was hurried. I think it is only a matter of time until her addiction will cause her knack to reassert itself again. She will start hunting again. We have to prevent that from happening.”

  I swallowed hard. My throat was dry. “I know where she works, or at least the area. When are we going to do that?”

  “Ah. Exactly right. Let me think on that for a bit. Our plan of attack must bear the light of day. She’s the savage, not you and I. We can’t do anything that would risk discovery; speed can cause mistakes. Caution will be very important.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Miss Hoch was going to have her knack-sucking ways brought to an end.

  “Mr. Goodturn, how are we going to protect others from her? What are we going to do that will…stop her?” I asked, desperate for a simple answer.

  Frowning, he placed his hands on his knees and looked me straight in the eye. “All creatures want one thing. They may distract themselves with temporary pursuits, but we’re going to give her the one thing she truly desires.”

  So much for easy answers, I thought. “What’s that?”

  His voice dropped to a low, hoarse whisper, “Peace.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Perspective is an interesting thing. Take the average high school student for instance. What to worry about? A paper that’s
due, the quiz you may not be prepared to take, or the book you’re reading for English that is four hundred pages long that you haven’t started. Then there’s the personal stuff. Things that as you grow older might have less freak-out potential but in the pressure cooker of high school, that social stress seems huge. Girlfriend or boyfriend problems, getting messed with by some jerk or dealing with problems at home that follow you to school.

  Then there’s me. As Sunday got unwrapped, I wasn’t worrying about any of those typical teenage issues. I was busy recovering from an animal tranquilizer hangover. There was also the not so small item to consider regarding Miss Hoch. I couldn’t bring myself to start calling her Mrs. Goodturn.

  When we had been talking about what to do about her, Mr. Goodturn had said we were going to give her peace. That had sounded mysterious and vague the night before. On Sunday morning, it sounded ominous—final.

  The Sunday sky had opened up and was dumping rain by the gallon. Mom told me that in the old days, when people had thatched roofs, dogs and cats would sleep on them for warmth. When it rained, they would jump off. Hence, the phrase raining cats and dogs. Well, there were no domestic pets falling outside but it was raining so hard that I couldn’t see beyond my window. Thankfully, my Saturday haul had been good and through all of the craziness on the bus, I had managed to arrive home with my backpack. Oso must have placed it in Mr. Goodturn’s car after he had helped me into the front seat.

  Oso was another wildcard that I was trying to sort out. While it was a relief to know that he wasn’t gunning for me (figuratively or literally), I wasn’t completely comfortable with his appointing himself my protector. His comments about the nature of dogs and his lack of trust in them made sense to me because I certainly didn’t think I could count on how he would react under different pressure or circumstances. It was kind of like having a pet grizzly bear, not all that cute and cuddly to begin with and just a matter of time until the family cat goes missing.