Thirst No. 2: Phantom, Evil Thirst, and Creatures of Forever

by Christopher Pike

  Lieutenant Treach is slow in answering and I feel bad for him. He can’t point the finger at me without pointing it at his wife. And besides the fact that he doesn’t want to get her in trouble, nothing about the case makes any sense.

  “I told you, I’m inclined to take your word that you’re innocent. But Gary Stevens is pressing charges against you, and my captain wants you to return here for questioning. I tell you this as a friendly warning. If Gary Stevens should go to the papers and associate you with blood doping, even if you’re totally innocent, it could damage your name. That’s why I prefer we nip this in the bud.”

  “I can’t return to Denver at this time. I’m busy and I’m innocent. Tell Gary Stevens that if he does speak to the media about this incident, I’ll sue him for slander. Impress upon him how serious I am. Also, please stop calling my parents. If you need to speak to me, call me.”

  “I tried your number. I only went to your parents when you didn’t return my calls.”

  “From now on, I promise to call you back. But right now I have to go. Tell your partner I’ll speak to him later. Okay?”

  “He just needs a minute of your time.”

  “Not now. I’ll check in with you in two days. Bye.”

  I hang up and groan. For centuries I fed my thirst without raising eyebrows. Even when modern times arrived, I adapted and kept my need for blood hidden. Largely because I required so little and because the power of my gaze was so formidable. Now I slip up a couple of times and I’ve set a whole mountain of suspicion in motion. The only positive in this whole mess is that these are mistakes Teri would make.

  I finally call Matt and confess to him the mess I’m in. The guy has his sources. They are much more extensive than my own. He already has a fairly clear idea about my legal problems. He reminds me that it’s all my fault, that I should have turned to him for help. But he doesn’t spend a lot of time scolding me. He probably considers Detective Treach and Gary Stevens minor irritants. Matt has power. If and when he returns to Denver, he’ll visit both men and look them in the eye and they won’t even remember who I am.

  “I’ll take care of them when I get a free moment,” he says. “For now, Charlie might have fixed the T-11 vaccine to work on your average person. He’s anxious to try it out on Shanti and Seymour.”

  “That’s incredible. How did he do it so rapidly?”

  “The guy’s a genius. We underestimated him because of the way he carries himself. Also, he admits that the Telar did experiment with normal people while they were developing the X6X6 virus, mostly in backward villages in Africa where it was easy to hide the atrocious results. Before Charlie joined our team, he was already thinking how the vaccine could be adjusted. But he didn’t want to admit it until he had something concrete to show us.”

  “Shanti and Seymour will be relieved to hear this news. I’ll get them back to you tomorrow. The next day at the latest.”

  “What’s wrong with today?”

  “We’re investigating an important IIC lead. A guy who was part of the company at the start, but who has carefully separated himself from Brutran and the others.”

  “I’m surprised she let any of her key people go.”

  “When she could just kill them, yeah, I know what you mean. It’s odd. But let us finish investigating this guy. We think he has the answer to many interesting secrets.”

  “Is he willing to share them with you?”

  “That’s just it, he’s a great guy. He has heart. You can’t imagine he would have anything to do with Brutran.”

  “Be careful, Teri. It might be a trap.”

  “I will.” I pause. “Hey, have you heard from your mother yet?”

  He hesitates. “No.”

  “But you’ve tried to contact her?”

  “Yes. I told you we haven’t spoken in ages. I would have been surprised if she’d gotten back to me right away.”

  He’s lying, I can tell. I can hear the disappointment in his voice. He fears his mother is avoiding him, or worse, that she’s dead. I know nothing about their relationship. Perhaps I can spray more of Yaksha’s pages with my blood and see if I can find any hidden messages that talk about Umara and Matt.

  “Where are you?” Matt asks.

  “Santa Cruz. You?”

  “The East Coast. I’d rather not be more specific right now. Tell me what you learned from Professor Sharp.”

  “Let me tell you tonight, after we finish questioning his student. To me, they’re two sides of the same coin. We’ll have a much better idea of the IIC when we’re done.”

  “Whatever you discover, I still think it’s a mistake to go to the IIC for help.”

  “I understand. You have a rare insight into how evil they are. Like Sita, you’re one of the few people who has lived through an Array attack.”

  He is silent a long time. “Why do you bring that up now?”

  “I know it upset you. It would upset anyone to have their mind ripped away from them.”

  “Yeah,” he says softly.

  “But there is one thing I don’t understand about what happened that morning up on the mountain. I’ve been talking to Seymour and he said that Sita believed the IIC needed a sample of her blood to turn the Array against her. How did they get a sample of your blood?”

  “No one connected to the IIC has my blood.”

  “They must have it. Seymour said—”

  “I don’t care what he said. From the time I was young, my mother and father taught me to guard my blood carefully. In the last few years, since the IIC came into existence, I’ve never let anyone close enough to me that they could have gotten even a microscopic amount of my blood.”

  “Then the Array shouldn’t have worked on you.”

  “Sita had a theory the IIC needed her blood in order for it to work. She was obviously mistaken. I know you idolized her, Teri, but she wasn’t always right.”

  “I know.” He’s wrong. They must have his blood.

  “However their Array works, the IIC are monsters. We can’t go to them with our hat in our hand. Chances are they’ll cut our hand off.”

  “I don’t totally disagree. Professor Sharp made it clear Brutran’s a witch. It’s just an option. Let’s not close any doors until we know what’s behind them all.”

  Once again he takes a long time to respond.

  “You’re beginning to sound like Sita.”

  I fight not to freeze up. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Seriously, Charlie has got to see Shanti and Seymour immediately. He’s confident he can get rid of their symptoms. You know how much is riding on this vaccine.”

  “If we don’t fly out tomorrow, maybe you can fly here.”

  “I already have Charlie set up in a temporary lab. I don’t want to take him away from his work, not even for an hour. The fate of the world might rest with that guy.”

  “That’s a scary thought.”

  “I trust him. I know he helped the Telar create the virus, but he’s working himself to death to make this right.”

  “Tell him we’re all rooting for him.”

  “I will.” He pauses. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course, silly. How can you ask that?”

  “You’re a vampire now. You’ve gone through a major change. Your feelings toward everything must have changed.”

  “They have. Except when it comes to you. My love for you will never change.”

  He draws in a deep breath. “That’s nice to hear. Will you call soon?”

  “Of course. Take care, Matt. Watch out for the Telar.”

  “Watch out for the IIC. You’re poking your heads in their backyard, questioning these people. Make no mistake, Brutran’s going to hear about it. My advice to you is, finish questioning this guy as fast as you can and charter a plane and fly into New York tonight.”

  I tell him I’ll consider his suggestion. When I put down the phone I discover my heart�
��s pounding. The strain of talking to him and keeping up the facade is immense. I can’t maintain it forever. A single mistake and it could all be over. He’s faster and more powerful than lightning. In his rage, he could snap my neck before I saw him coming.

  ELEVEN

  It takes until after lunch to get Freddy settled in one place so we can talk to him. I suppose we can’t complain. We have dropped in on Mary and Freddy without warning. They have fed us and given us a place to sleep for the night. When they go shopping for fresh produce at an organic market, on the other side of town, all we can do is wait.

  I convey Matt’s news to the others, and suddenly Seymour and Shanti are more interested in Charlie and his research than the IIC. I guess I’d feel the same way if a plague of black blisters kept reappearing on my body and itching like crazy. I give Shanti a double dose of the vaccine we have and her symptoms improve but don’t vanish.

  Finally, Freddy is all ours. The group, Mary included, squeezes into the cramped living room to hear the parts of the IIC’s birth that Professor Sharp was too frightened to tell us about. It’s probably a good thing Mary’s present. Freddy, looking nervous, downs three beers before he even starts.

  I just want to get him talking. There’s no way I’m going to start with the Cradle. I can be patient, if the need is there. By the time I’m done with Freddy, I’ll know everything he knows.

  “Mary says you’re super psychic,” I say. “That you tested better than anyone Professor Sharp had ever met before. Is that true?”

  Sitting on the floor next to Mary and me, Freddy stares at his bottle of beer, takes a sip, and then nods. “That’s how I met the man. He was always canvassing the campus for people to volunteer for his experiments. One day I decided to give it a try. I remember it vividly because he scheduled me for an odd hour—from twelve at night to one in the morning. Cindy was there. She sat across from me in a small room. She’d pick up a card, stare at it for thirty seconds, then set it down and wait fifteen seconds before picking up another card. I can’t say she was totally professional. She winked at me a few times during the test. She was so damn pretty, it was hard to focus on the cards. But I guess I did great. When the hour was up Professor Sharp burst in the room and shook my hand. I thought it was a weird thing for a professor to do. He said he wanted to congratulate me, that I’d gotten sixty-five correct hits out of seventy-five cards.”

  “That’s better than eighty percent,” I say. “Were you able to keep up that average?”

  “That’s the first thing Sharp wanted to find out. He had me come back the next day and tested me all over again, this time using two hundred and fifty cards. I didn’t mind, the research was funded by the university and they paid us five dollars for every hour we sat in one of his chairs. I made twenty bucks that second day. Back then, that was a lot of money. I don’t know who the tester was, except it wasn’t Cindy. But I remember I scored around seventy-five percent and the professor said I could be the next Uri Geller.”

  “Who’s that?” Shanti asks.

  “A famous psychic from the seventies,” Freddy says. “He was supposed to be able to bend spoons with his mind. A lot of people said he was a fake, a smooth stage magician. But there were many scientists who believed he was genuine. I don’t know, our paths never crossed. I had my hands full with Professor Sharp. I was close to finishing my undergraduate degree in chemistry. I was thinking about becoming a doctor. But Sharp told me it would be a waste of my talents. He wanted me to get a master’s in parapsychology, in a program he was starting up. I told him no but when he came back to me with a full scholarship—that included room and board—it was hard to refuse.”

  Mary sighs. “Never mind that you were dating Cindy at the time.”

  “I admit she influenced my decision. I fell for her big-time. We were together night and day. Cindy was full of life back then. But my interest in the professor’s work was genuine. I could see that he’d hit on an amazing tool with his array. The more people we brought aboard, and the better we got at screening them, the more impressive were our results. We didn’t just prove the existence of telepathy, we were able to do the same when it came to precognition.”

  “When you talk about proving precognition,” I say, “you’re talking about playing the stock market, aren’t you?”

  “When Cindy brought up using the stock market, it seemed a clever way of testing whether the array could predict events. Understand, we didn’t start down that road until after we’d been together a couple of years. Noel and Wendy were already married by then and had a kid, Angela. We were all surviving on our scholarships—except for Tom, Thomas Brutran, who had his own money—but we were living on the edge. We were often broke. When Cindy showed us how we could take a small sum and multiply it several times over, it seemed like manna from heaven.”

  “Did Sharp approve of using his research to make money?” I ask.

  “We didn’t tell him. At least not at first.”

  “Why not?” Paula asks.

  “Cindy asked us to keep it secret so we could prove that it worked before showing him the results. I felt kind of funny going behind his back, but I have to say Cindy wasn’t the easiest person in the world to argue with. She was so strong-willed, she had to have her way.”

  “I believe you,” I mutter.

  “When we finally did tell him, he yelled at us that none of the other academics would take us seriously now. The truth is, I think he was just looking for someone to blame for why he couldn’t get his results published. He said that Cindy’s money-making system had made his peers think he was operating a Ponzi scheme. Those were tense times. We’d been together for over two years and there was talk among the other teachers that Sharp was squandering the university’s money. He was still having to pay everyone who volunteered. When the array reached a thousand heads, you can see how funds started to be a problem. Ironically, it was Cindy who kept the experiments alive with the money she made on the market. That was true even after Berkeley shut us down.” He pauses. “I don’t suppose Sharp told you that.”

  “He didn’t mention it,” I say.

  “How did the Cradle come into existence?” Seymour asks, growing impatient. I sympathize with his mood. Freddy has begun to repeat several points Sharp has already told us. It’s time to cut to the chase. He tenses at the question and stares at his beer bottle. He doesn’t respond, not at first. Mary strokes his back and whispers in his ear.

  “Tell them, honey. It’ll be good to get it off your chest.”

  Freddy sighs. “It’s hard. It was my fault.”

  “It was Cindy’s fault,” Mary says.

  Freddy looks up. “Two unrelated events led to the creation of the Cradle. The first was definitely my fault. I’d heard a rumor that Tom—the man you know as Thomas Brutran, the president of IIC—had been seen kissing Cindy at some restaurant. I don’t know why I didn’t confront her about it. I guess I was afraid she’d tell me it was true. Suffice to say I was pretty upset to get the news. To make matters worse, I heard about it two hours before we were supposed to have a full gathering of the array. Back then we didn’t usually get everyone together in the same room to conduct our experiments. We’d discovered that a person could be on the phone and give us practically the identical support, as long as we were all on one line together.

  “That day was different. Sharp wanted to get everyone together to see if we could boost our results. I forget his reason. I just know it was a pity I was chosen to lead the group. My brain was on fire. All I could think of was Cindy in Tom’s arms. And here I was the guy in charge of helping everyone focus.” Freddy stopped and shook his head. “I know that’s why it happened.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “During the session, Tom started having trouble breathing. His skin took on a bluish tinge. He gasped for us to help him. He felt as if he had a mountain on his chest, crushing him down. The professor was sure he was having a heart attack. We called for an ambulance. It goes without
saying we broke up the array. After that, we were all afraid to do any psychic work. Especially me.”

  “Why you?” I ask.

  “Isn’t it obvious? I was the one who hurt Tom. I was the one who almost stopped his heart. I didn’t mean to, I couldn’t control myself. I already told you the state of mind I was in. Then, when I took my place in front of the crowd, and they closed their eyes, I felt this huge magnetic web encircle me. I can still recall how it felt to this day. It was like a huge spider entered the auditorium and spun a hideous web that somehow linked us together. It was real, it was as tangible as a physical object. There was only one thing that kept me from running screaming from that auditorium. The one thing that overshadowed the horror I felt.”

  “It was a sense of power,” I say.

  Freddy stares at me, stunned. “How did you know?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  He nods. “It was like my anger toward Tom got magnified a thousandfold and transformed into something else. Into an evil I’d never dreamed could exist.”

  I suddenly have trouble breathing. I cannot stop thinking of Numbria in that crummy London motel room, and what I did to her. I know the evil he is talking about.

  “What happened to Tom?” Seymour asks.

  “He had a heart attack. He ended up spending over a month in the hospital. A twenty-five-year-old guy who didn’t smoke or drink and who played tennis before breakfast. He couldn’t have been in better shape. Yet somehow my mind, in connection with the array, almost killed him.”

  “That’s quite a leap from answering yes and no questions,” Seymour says.

  “You’re telling me. It was a power we just stumbled onto.”

  “Did you tell Sharp about your state of mind during the experiment?” Seymour asks.

  “I confessed to the others what I’d done. My guilt haunted me. But ironically the professor didn’t blame me. He felt it was a fluke. Still, to be on the safe side, he made it a rule that no one was to join an array if they were feeling emotional.”