Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction

by James Newman Benefit Anthology

  * * *

  Chapter Four: Faith

  They stood in the darkness and stared together at the skies. The clouds were low enough to damned near touch and the wind was blowing steadily from the west, lifting their hair and flipping the strands, whipping the edges of their clothes in a constant frenzy.

  None of them spoke at first. They just watched as the clouds roiled and seethed and then, finally, the first flashes of distant lightning licked the heavens.

  Stephen moved a few feet to the left and checked on his camera. The settings were the same as before. He always fretted. The chances of capturing the images he wanted were slim enough already, but if the settings were wrong none of the pictures would turn out right.

  Faith stared at the sky and licked her lips nervously. Tim stared at her, his eyes wide with a sense of wonder and a growing desire. Had anyone asked him if he loved her he would have said no. Most of the time he would have been telling the truth. When the lightning came, however, his heart made him a liar.

  Faith was a beautiful girl, no two ways about it, but there was something spectacular, overwhelmingly different about her when the storms came. There was something…divine about her.

  He loved her with all of his heart when the storms roared through the heavens. At those times her very pulse matched the thunder. Sounded crazy, but it was true. They’d tested it more than once.

  Faith’s presence changed the nature of the weather. The storms were stronger when she was around, the wind was harsher the rains more intense, and the lightning, oh, the lightning. It flashed and strobed and damned near screamed when Faith stood outside.

  Tim’s skin tingled and he stared up toward the sky as the first fat drops of rain started falling. Stephen turned the camera slightly; the tarp over the actual lens fluttered slightly in the growing winds, but was well secured.

  Faith closed her eyes and took in a deep breath. Her full lips twitched slightly, almost pulling into a smile, but she stopped herself from showing that much emotion. She was careful, always so careful about how much she let show. One of the most amazing girls either of the boys had ever known, friendly and cheerful and always so much more…there…than other girls, but still she held herself in check most times, like she was afraid to show too much of herself.

  “Can you do it, Faith?” Stephen’s voice was almost stolen by the wind, but she looked his way and nodded.

  Her teeth worried her lower lip for a second and then she nodded again. “I think so.” Her blue eyes looked around for a moment and finally fixed on a tree halfway down the hill. “Aim there.”

  Stephen nodded his head and took careful aim, focusing the long-range lens until he had the best possible angle on the tree and the surroundings.

  Tim bit the inside of his mouth until he felt the sudden heat of broken flesh and tasted fresh blood spilling across his tongue. It was one thing to believe something, another to see proof positive. He stepped back from her, much as he wanted to be closer, and aimed the video camera. He had to capture her, Stephen and his camera and the targeted landmark all at once. His heart slammed in his chest and he shrugged his shoulders, trying to fight off a cramp from the weight of the recording equipment. No handheld video for this. This was the serious stuff, expensive equipment signed out from the university. Fifteen thousand dollars worth of steadicam. Signed out under his father’s name, because he wasn’t a student. Wasn’t old enough to be a student at the university. His father would skin him alive if he screwed up.

  Stephen called out, his voice breaking nervously, “Now. Do it now!”

  Faith turned her head toward her target and gestured with her right hand.

  The night exploded.

  * * *

  Tim stared at the pictures for a very long time. He’d seen them all before, of course, but he looked again, in the privacy of his room, and shook his head, amazed.

  When he was done examining the images he hit the “Play” button on his DVD player and watched the entire thing again in slow motion.

  Stephen screamed for Faith to do it now.

  Faith moved only a little and her fingers twitched.

  And the lightning came down from the skies, an amazing stream of liquid light that caressed and licked at the largest tree on the slope. The tree never had a chance. Lightning slashed the wood into flaming shreds that danced through the air even as they exploded. Superheated sap ignited and boiled and thrashed through the sky and plummeted down to the ground, covering Stephen in a cascade of small flames that he completely ignored as he kept taking his pictures of the tree.

  Two seconds later the world was almost completely dark in comparison, but Tim could see Stephen slapping at his arms as the flames tried to grow, and he heard the man’s distant profanities.

  And Faith turned her face to look at Stephen for a second, her perfect features cold and expressionless. No, not expressionless, it was simply an expression that she never wore. It was a look of arrogance that she would never show under most circumstances.

  Behind her the sky flashed with a distant stroke of lightning. Her eyes in the video glowed with the exact same light. The view was crystal clear. The lightning was at least a half-mile from her, but that startling white glare flashed in her eyes at the same instant. The light shadowed her face just as it should have, but not her eyes.

  And then she turned toward Tim and her features shifted into a tentative smile.

  “Did you get it, Tim? Please tell me you got it.”

  He heard himself on the recording. “Um. Yeah, I think I did.”

  She jumped a little and clapped her hands. “Sweet.” Her smile grew larger on the TV and he felt his mouth pull into a mirror of that expression. Her smile always did that to him, even when the thought of her unbelievable ability made him want to piss himself.

  He looked at the photos again as the recording went on, Stephen excitedly yelling out the time and date as the winds roared even harder and more lightning painted the sky and Faith’s eyes.

  There was no doubting Stephen’s technical prowess. The pictures were perfectly clear. He’d managed to capture Faith in motion, her face in profile, her eyes looking toward the tree, the light spilling from her eyes and the sparks that arced across her skin as the lightning came down and destroyed the old tree that had stood in the same spot for easily a hundred years.

  More than that, however, the pictures showed the lightning perfectly. Showed the shape of each fork as it flashed through the air and cut the night into daylight brightness.

  If he looked carefully, he could see the twisted forms, the distorted faces of the creatures that followed Faith’s bidding. The shapes were feminine, the faces, warped by the speed they moved at, were still obvious enough to him. It wasn’t just that Faith called down the lightning. She possessed it, too. It was her shape, her face that travelled through each fiery branch.

  Stephen claimed he couldn’t see anything unusual in the electrical discharge. Faith had said nothing when he pointed out the shapes that moved through the stream of white light.

  Faith said nothing.

  Stephen lied. There was nothing else to it. He lied.

  Tim didn’t know what to make of any of it. He didn’t know if he should be delighted that they could actually prove Faith’s unusual power or if he should be terrified that she had that sort of ability in the first place.

  He thought over the entire scenario again, trying to imagine if he had somehow missed something. When that proved fruitless, he looked at the photos again.

  He didn’t want to be afraid of Faith. He loved her. Or at least he thought he could love her.

  But whenever he thought of the look on her face when she called down the lightning he felt a growing sense of dread try to swallow him. Because whatever she was when she was summoning the lightning to do her bidding, she most assuredly wasn't the girl he’d known since grade school.

  Either bringing down the lightning changed her for a moment, or it revealed her true face. He didn’t kno
w which for sure. He just knew that she was different in the storms.

  They never showed the film to anyone. They meant to, but the world got in the way. The world, and Faith’s father, who was afraid not of his daughter, but of anyone finding out about her. Well, that was almost the truth. Stephen showed the film to his older brother, who was already in college.

  That simple act changed everything.

  * * *

  “What does it feel like when you bring the lightning down?” He asked the question without hesitating. They’d known each other since they were six and no matter what happened, Tim didn’t believe that Faith would hurt him. No more than she would grow wings and fly to Mars.

  They were sitting on one of the benches in Westphalen Park. From where they were he could see the whole of Summitville and beyond that he could see Lake Overtree where it shimmered above the distant tree line.

  Faith looked at him for a moment without speaking, her mouth moving as she chewed at the slice of apple she’d pulled from her lunch bag. Without warning she leaned toward him and her full, sweet lips pressed into his. Tim tried to gasp and as he opened his mouth to exhale the shocked breath her tongue licked past his teeth and flicked across his taste buds, bringing the taste of sweet, succulent fruit and her own taste along with it. His tongue tingled from the contact, and his heart hammered in his chest. For that one moment he forgot what breathing was, what his name was, everything in the world, except for the feel of her lips kissing his. She became his world, his universe. They had never kissed before, though he had fantasized about the idea more times than he could clearly count.

  When he would surely have suffocated if she kissed him for even one more instant—and suffocated gladly—she pulled back from him and looked into his eyes with an unusual expression of joy on her face.

  “About like that, I think.” Her voice carried a tint of amusement, but nothing bitter or dark, more like a sigh of happiness at a secret shared.

  “Wow.” He could barely think well enough to form even that one word.

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  * * *

  There was no easy way to deal with it. Faith’s father was a dick. They’d known each other for as long as Tim could remember and the man had always been distant, but lately he’d been looking at Tim like he was the worst kind of disease. And maybe he was. He was the guy who was stealing the man’s daughter from him. It hadn’t been an intentional thing. What had long been a friendship was becoming something else and while both Tim and Faith were okay with it, while their mothers and Tim’s father were okay with it, Faith’s dad was being a complete prick. Not that he would ever say that in front of her. Faith loved her dad. Adored him, really.

  That was the problem. She loved him too much. The idea of disobeying him went against everything she believed in. He was a devout man, and he was also a powerful man. He was on the board for the University and with only a word he could probably make Tim’s father’s life very uncomfortable. That alone wouldn’t have stopped Tim from being with Faith. She was that important to him.

  And maybe he was important to her, too. She said he was, but still she broke his heart. She ruined him with a simple statement. “Daddy says we can’t be together, Tim,” like those words somehow explained everything. For her they did. She could no sooner disobey her father than she could survive at the bottom of the ocean. Just when he was falling for her in the worst possible way, she broke it off. He did his best not to let it show. What other choice was there?

  Of course they still saw each other. Nothing could change that without causing serious waves. They’d gone to the same private school all their lives, and they were in the same classes. But the likelihood of them being alone together was nonexistent.

  Damnedest thing. He could tell it bothered Faith as much as it did him. She just couldn’t consider disobeying her father.

  So he behaved himself and was as friendly as he could manage and he pretended that she wasn’t ripping his heart out every day, pretended that seeing her wasn't an exquisite agony that made him want to scream. He pretended that they were just friends and that she wasn’t his addiction.

  That was the word, wasn’t it? Addiction? Yes. He was addicted. He needed to see her every day. He needed to be near her. Addiction. Obsession. Whatever. It fit. She knew it, too. She knew it and because she was a decent human being, she only now and then used it against him. No. He had to amend that. She was good about not pushing it. Not exploiting it. She just, now and then, she needed him just as much and she’d call him on the phone like it was nothing special. She would come by and say hello to his folks and ask if she could borrow Tim’s notes for this class or that because she had lost hers again.

  And he took it. He let her. Because it was an excuse to spend five precious minutes with her, drinking in her scent, maybe daring a touch of his fingers over hers, a brush of body against body, no matter how ephemeral. He took it, and he reveled in it. And he came closer to believing in her divinity than he ever had to believing in God. She was surely as close to Heaven as he would ever get.

  And then she would leave and he would plummet back into the miserable depths of his personal Hell, waiting for her to be near him again.

  He knew exactly how pathetic he was. He’d told off a couple of his friends for getting hooked on girls in the past. Bill Bronson tried to point that out to him and he heard the words but they meant nothing to him. He was on the other end of that particular sermon for the first time in his life and understood just how bad it could be. First love? Maybe. He didn’t even know if it was love. But it was definitely addiction. What an amazingly understated word.

  He hated every second of it. Almost as much as he loved the time with Faith.

  So, yes, her dad was a dick. He’d have seriously thought about doing something crazy to the man if he didn’t know how much it would hurt Faith. As much as losing her would ruin him, the same would happen to Faith if she lost her father. How sick was that shit?

  So he let it go. He wallowed in his misery and thrived when they were together. When they could be friends and he could pretend they were something more.

  All of which made him the perfect person to notice that she was being followed. No. Being stalked.

  He didn’t know the man’s name. He just spotted the guy one day and realized he’d seen him before and more than once.

  He was not anything special. He was a college age kid in a university town, with light brown hair, blue eyes and a scruff on his chin that would have been a beard if he was old enough to actually grow one. Both ears pierced, with little blue metallic studs that were supposed to make him stand out from all the other guys wearing little metallic studs. Spiked hair, baggy jeans, a dozen different shirts from a dozen different bands that his parents had probably listened to. In other words, another kid.

  He stuck out solely because he was always looking at Faith and that meant they were almost always looking in the same direction.

  Tim didn’t say anything at first, he just watched, his nerves telling him that there was something creepy about the guy. He was in his early twenties and fixated on a fifteen-year-old girl. How was that normal?

  So, yes, he watched the man who was watching Faith. And he grew suspicious of him. And he grew a little jealous on the occasions when Faith noticed the older boy and smiled in his direction.

  He tried telling her once. She looked at him and smiled and shook her head and dismissed the entire thing. Not because she was clueless, but because she had never thought she was anything all that special. Even when she was calling down lightning and blowing a tree into shreds, she never thought she was anything special.

  Except, of course, for that brief moment, when she looked so coldly upon the world. That was a different situation, wasn’t it?

  He didn’t like to think about that. He preferred to believe that the coldness was merely a trick of the light or the lightning as it were. A trick of the lightning. That was all. He could make himself believe it if he
tried hard enough.

  They still walked to school together. He saw the creepy guy almost every day. He learned to hate the guy, but far more importantly, he learned to watch for him. He gave up telling Faith about the man because she refused to believe there was a reason to be worried.

  He could have yelled, could have forced her to see it. He would have when they were just friends, but a kiss and an acknowledgement between them had changed that. Her father’s disapproval kept them from being more than friends and both of them wanted more. But it was tenuous. If he caused waves she might want to break away from him completely and that was too much to consider.

  So he watched. He stayed near Faith and wished he could have more and he watched and waited for the creep from the university to do something stupid.

  Eventually his vigilance was rewarded.

  * * *

  The day he died Tim was walking with Faith and two other friends, heading home for the weekend. They were not making plans, because, of course, Faith’s dad would have had a fit. There was a chance that the next weekend they would get together and do something fun. Maybe see a movie or even go out to the strip mall not far from the neighborhood and just hang out. Her dad was going out of town and for a change of pace Faith wasn’t supposed to go with him and his wife. Her mom had other plans and Faith would be staying in town. A rare, decidedly precious chance to be together and alone. Tim’s prayers were answered, however tentatively.

  So he was in a good mood. He was always in a good mood when he was with her, and with that chance for the next weekend, well, he was damned near ready to dance and Tim hated dancing.

  He was looking at Faith and she was pushing an errant strand of hair behind her tiny, perfect ear, her eyes on their friend Lisa, who was talking about the latest episode of Supernatural, a show she watched because she basically worshipped both of the guys on the show. Lisa was talking about how one of the brothers—Sam?—had a perfect ass, which had Faith laughing and blushing simultaneously.