The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set

by Peter Meredith

  "Will you tell me what happened?" Ingstrom said. "Starting with where you were when all this began. Were you asleep?"

  "Yeah, only I don't know what woke me up...the house I think. There were weird noises, and it got colder and I had a real bad dream. And... and I was ascared."

  "What did you do when you got scared? Did you go look for your mommy or daddy?"

  "No. I hid under the bed," Katie said without any emotion. She stared at the bandaged arm of her mother as she spoke. "I was afraid to leave it...and there was something out in the hall. And...and my mommy came in and we were gonna run, but we got trapped with no place to go."

  "So what happened after your mommy came in?"

  "We were ascared to go into the hallway on-a-cuz of the monster and...." She stopped speaking in mid-sentence and sat with her mouth open, shaking her head gently back and forth.

  "A monster? Did you see it in the hallway?" Ingstrom's relaxed and unforced manner suggested he was used to dealing with children.

  "Yeah after...after I saw...I saw...."Again she stopped talking and Gayle hugged her daughter with her non-broken arm.

  "I think she has answered enough questions, William," Gayle said. "What more is there to say?"

  "Mrs. Jern, I have to ask just a couple more questions. If I don't, I know my C.O. will have me come back again in an hour and it's best to get it over with." Ingstrom was very reasonable and he had a kind face.

  Gayle, won over by his logic and kind approach, nodded.

  Ingstrom squatted down next the bed so he was below her level. "Just a few more questions. Katie, was the monster a person...someone you know?"

  "No...huh...huh...huh," her breath began hitching roughly in her chest, but her eyes were still clear and free of tears. "It was a...a mon... monster. It was scary and mean and nasty and all covered in black."

  "It was dark in the hallway, and it was all in black. Did you have trouble seeing it?" Ingstrom asked.

  "Yeah," she replied. Suddenly her breathing cleared up entirely and her voice grew clear, "It was big and black and it was hard to see into it ...but I didn't want to see it neither...it was too scary."

  "Katie, where was your daddy when you were trapped in your bedroom?"

  Katie stared far away. "I don't know," she answered in a small voice.

  Warrant officer Ingstrom glanced briefly at William and then back to Katie, suddenly looked sad. "Did you ever see your daddy at the same time as you saw the monster?"

  Katie seemed almost to be dreaming with her eyes open. "Yes. He rescued us. He ran up to the monster and I thought he was going to fight it and I was so afraid for him. But he picked up mommy...and brought her outside." She stared far away for a few seconds, remembering, and then she snapped back to the present. "You were very brave, Daddy. What is a coma and what's wrong with Tal? What did the doctor mean by thermo...irrigation? What's that mean?"

  "Katie...." William started to say, but Katie began to cry.

  "Is Tal going to die? Why? Why is she going to die? I don't want her to leave. I want her to stay with me! I'm her best friend, and there're no kids in heaven, only old people and she'll be so lonely without me. And I'll be lonely without her." Katie cried with true sorrow.

  This wasn't a cry over a broken toy or a lost kite or stubbed toe. It was a soul-rending cry that pained William deeply to see and to hear. Soon all of the Jerns were weeping quietly. After a few minutes, Katie began to settle down and William said, "Gayle, are you strong enough to go see Talitha?"

  "I have to be," she responded still holding her youngest.

  "Commander, I have to apologize for the last question, but...it happens more than you think."

  Confused, Gayle asked, "What happens? Monst...I mean attacks here on the island?"

  William hung his head and depression started to settle on his weary face. "No," he told her. "He's talking about domestic abuse."

  "Oh yeah, it's mostly what I investigate these days." Ingstrom shook his head sadly. "Can I have you tell me what happened from your point of view?" he asked Gayle.

  She hadn't got past the idea of abuse. "But he has never hurt any of us! Look at him...if he hit me, I would break in half! This is preposterous." Gayle appeared bewildered at the thought. Ingstrom only looked gloomier.

  "Gayle, the victims of abuse tend to deny what has happened and they will often defend their abuser." William added dejectedly. "I think we should tell our version of what happened and know the truth is on our side."

  She pursed her lips tightly for a few seconds and then spoke quickly and without emotion. Her story was over in less than a minute and it was obvious she had received all of William's signals; she didn't mention the demon once. Without the demon in her story, it came out sounding suspicious, and Ingstrom looked sharply at Gayle. She didn't seem to care and exhaustion pulled down on her eyelids.

  "Do you know where your husband was last night," the Investigator asked her.

  "No..."

  "I was out looking for my son who was past his curfew," William spoke up defensively.

  "Did you find him?"

  William shook his head. Even the barest suggestion of abuse was sending him deeper into despair.

  "Do you have guns or other weapons in the house?"

  William immediately thought of his useless ceremonial dress sword, but Gayle said, "Just some steak knives in the kitchen."

  "Ok, I think those are all my questions for you, Mrs. Jern." Ingstrom then turned to Will. "Did you see what happened to your sister?"

  "No...when I came home, I saw Talitha on the second-floor landing...unconscious. I looked down the hall and I saw the...you know, the man. So I grabbed her and went to run away but I fell down the stairs instead. My dad came up from outside and helped us out of the house."

  "Is that when you yelled for your wife to leave?" Ingstrom asked William.

  "Yes...Will told me they were trapped and...and I heard it coming so I figured it was their best chance."

  Ingstrom looked thoughtful for a few moments. "Have any of you made enemies? Gotten into any fights? Have you had to discipline anyone recently, Commander?" The answer was no to all the questions. After a minute of the Jerns looking back and forth at each other with nothing but shrugs, the investigator puffed his cheeks and blew out long and slow. "There isn't much to go on, I'm afraid. There were almost no clues of any sort at the house. Maybe we'll get lucky with the fingerprints we took."

  This was greeted with stony-faced silence from the family but Ingstrom seemed to just take it as a sign of exhaustion. "Now Commander, I want you to know that I personally don't see evidence of abuse here...however...it is my duty to follow up with the doctor to make sure he believes your injuries match up with the events as you described them. It'll just be a few minutes, can you all wait here?"

  They were silent until he left. "Oh my God! Why is this happening to us?" Gayle threw herself back onto her pillow. She seemed grief stricken as well as panic stricken simultaneously. "What did we do to deserve this? I try to be a good person..."

  William began a frantic pacing in the room. "This is my fault, Gayle. I should've been home. And the demon...I knew it last night..."

  "Huh? How? What? Where were you last night?" she hissed, her brows coming down hard. "I needed you! It was terrible being trapped in that room and Tal..." She trailed off looking down at her bed but seeing nothing.

  He went to her and kissed both her and Katie. "I'm so sorry. If I knew what was going to happen, I would've never left. I would've got everyone out of the house right away."

  "Right away? What do you mean? Do you know what caused it, did you see it?"

  "No, I just knew it on a gut level. I woke up a little after eleven and I just felt that something was wrong. I tried to go back to sleep but I was anxious or worried."

  "About what?" she asked.

  "The demon. I could feel the demon. I'd seen it before when we..."

  Gayle's eyes bulged. "You what? You saw the demon before? Why di
dn't you tell me? What were you thinking?" Her angry hissing came back but louder.

  He told them about the brief vision of the demon in the flash of the burned out bulb, the odd feelings he had experienced in the boiler room, and even about the repairman, and the Greek painter.

  "Then it's my fault too!" Katie cried. "I scared the painter real bad and called him names. Maybe he sicced the monster on us."

  "No Katie, something else happened last night. It wasn't you," William said reassuringly, "Last night that creepy feeling was back and much stronger. I was afraid and nervous, so I went to check on everyone, but Will wasn't home. I had this need to be together, as a family. I woke up Talitha to ask her where you might be, Will...what's wrong?"

  Will appeared in absolute misery. "I...uhhhg! If I had been at home instead of..."

  "Wait! You can't blame yourself in any way Willy J, none of us can," Gayle soothed. "How could any of you know what was going to happen?" After a pause she asked, "So, where were you?"

  Will had his head in his hands and spoke so softly that they almost couldn't hear him, "I was with Lisa. We got back together last night."

  "You did?" William said. "That's good. But Talitha told me which bench you two like to hang out at and you weren't there."

  "We were uh, somewhere else."

  "Wh..." William stopped, realizing then not where they were, but what they were doing. "Oh...well. Then that's why I missed you I guess."

  Gayle eyes went wide, stunned by the unspoken news. Will hung his head, refusing to look up. There was an awkward silence that William felt needed to be filled, "Either way, I ran down to that bench as fast as I could and when I saw you weren't there, I took the sea wall back, hoping you had gone that way. However, you weren't there either and my need to get back was almost desperate. I knew something bad was going to happen, so I sprinted home as fast as I could." He paused and stared at the black and white tile pattern of the hospital floor.

  "The house...when I got back, it was like it wasn't a house at all. A house is for the living, but last night it was a tomb. Did you feel it? How it felt hollow and dead inside?" Both Gayle and Will were nodding and staring off into space. William, overcome by his exhaustion, sat down in the chair between the two beds. "I heard a commotion on the backstairs, and it was you Will. There you were with Talitha lying on top of you and she was so pale-looking that I thought..." his chest became thick and heavy and he suddenly had trouble breathing.

  "Anyway, I felt It coming. It was moving down the hall on the second floor. I could feel it. So I picked up Talitha and you just laid there and I was starting to panic so I grabbed you too. I didn't know if you were still in the house," he said to Gayle. "I just knew that if you were still ali... I mean still upstairs that this was going to be your only chance to make a run for it. So I yelled... something." William stopped talking for a moment and looked out the window at the pretty June morning. He wasn't silent for long; he had an odd, almost what he considered a "girlish" need to talk about what happened to him the previous night.

  He told them of the frantic, wild state he had experienced. How each second had seemed to be vitally important, and he had known that if he lost even one to indecision, that someone would die. He told them of the life-draining feeling he had when he held Talitha and how the heat of the night had almost caused him to faint as he carried her to grass. He talked about how he felt seeing the demon on the main stairs just above Gayle. He spoke about how being in the thing's presence filled his brain with a terrific buzzing noise, as if a thousand angry bees had been let lose in his skull. And he told them about charging up the stairs to Gayle, afraid for her life because of all the blood.

  However, the one thing he refused to talk about was what happened when the demon invaded his mind. It had brought forth thoughts and memories that had been his and not his simultaneously. It had twisted these thoughts into dreadful perversions: His desire to save Talitha turned into a desire to save Talitha only for himself. So he could have her...sexually. He had pictured her naked, posing with sweet erotic innocence and he'd had to fight an internal battle to keep from being aroused. It was horrible. The demon seemed to be able to plant thoughts into his head and then draw them out again as if they were his own.

  His thoughts of Gayle had been equally bad. As he stood in the doorway of the foyer, he had hated her with an intense passion. It had seemed to him that she was a burdensome fat cow who he desperately wanted to throw to the floor and be rid of forever. She felt like a useless ton of bricks on his shoulder, weighing him down, just as she had been weighing him down ever since they first met.

  With the demon sweeping toward him, he hadn't been able to think of anything but how she was the reason he hadn't been assigned to a Cutter of his own. It had been all of her ridiculous whining about the sea that had held him back and undermined his ambitions. And then there was the fact that she got between him and Talitha. She was old, fat, and wrinkled; in bed she had the body, the energy, and the imagination of a walrus—while Talitha was a nubile hidden treasure, slim, perky, and tantalizing.

  Even as those appalling memories ran through his mind, Gayle asked him, "How were you able to keep going when the demon looked at you? When it looked on me, it felt like a bomb had gone off in my head and my body just sort of collapsed, no longer under my control."

  "I guess it was a little different for me," he replied lamely.

  "It looked at me too, and you're right Mom, it did feel like an explosion," Will agreed quietly. "It was very quick, a second or two only. I...I...think it was trying to hurt me, or knock me out. I know it didn't want me in the house." Will told his story then and he told it in a dazed, lifeless voice. It didn't take very long, but still he looked worn out by the effort of telling it. "So now what do we do? How do we get Talitha back? How can we fight the..."

  "We don't even try to fight it. It's too strong," William said feeling shamefully weak.

  "What if we got the priest?" Will asked.

  The image of chubby, slightly balding Father Alba came to mind and William shook his head. "The house blessing was a waste of time. I don't think Father Alba has any..." He wanted to say magic, but it seemed childish, "...power over this demon and I think it could kill the priest the second he walked in the door." There was a silence as they each sat back and considered ways to help Talitha, or ways to fight the demon. In seconds however, exhaustion overtook them and unbelievably they each slipped into a deep sleep. For an hour they lay as if dead to the world, undisturbed until William woke to the sound of whispers.

  2

  William sat up and looked blearily at the door where Doctor Thielsen and Warrant Officer Ingstrom were talking quietly. His brain seemed to have trouble putting together thoughts and for a long moment, he could do little but blink his weary eyes. Eventually, he sat up and checked the time and was surprised to see it was just a little after 10 a.m.

  Ingstrom came in with the doctor right behind him, and found the family in varying stages of wakefulness. "I'm sorry to wake you, Commander Jern, but I have to get back to the house to wrap up our investigation there, and we still have to rule out the uh abuse, however the doctor left your wife's chart in here."

  "Please by all means, Jeff. Come in Doctor." William replied as he stretched and yawned hugely.

  The doctor went to Gayle's bed and started flipping through his notes. "I see multiple injuries to Mrs. Jern. The broken radius is consistent with a fall...the laceration to the left wrist is almost exactly what we see at least once a month from Coasties punching windows. There are no fading contusions, which are usually indicative of long-term abuse. Now the lacerations to the son's chest could be a sign, but I doubt it. Overall, I would conclude that this isn't a domestic abuse situation."

  Ingstrom nodded his head, looking satisfied. "Commander, Mrs. Jern, I'm truly sorry this has happened to you and your family. I want to assure you we're going to do everything we can to find the person responsible for all of this and bring them to justice."
He smiled fleetingly and left in a hurry to complete his work.

  William and Gayle let out matching sighs of relief and then gave each other identical smiles—grim and tight.

  Perhaps out of habit, Doctor Thielsen began examining them. He started with Will and then moved on to Gayle, but she stopped him. "I'm sorry, Doctor, my daughter, I need to see her...I have to see her." The stress was getting to her again and she was close to tears. William worried about another breakdown when he saw her lips quivering and a wild look come into her eyes.

  "Of course, just let me get a wheelchair." Gayle started to protest the need for it, but the doctor wouldn't have it. "No, don't argue with me about the chair, Doctor's orders." Thielsen said with stern kindness. He was back in a moment with a wheelchair, and it was only a matter of minutes before they neared the door to the ICU.

  With each step toward his daughter's room, William began to grow anxious. The terrible thoughts the demon had put into him were suddenly coming back again: The vision of Talitha naked flashed into his mind.

  William felt like a dirty old man, a pedophile, who should be taken out and shot between the eyes. He wanted desperately to slap himself in the face as hard as he could. Instead, he reached out for Gayle's hand and held it tightly.

  Her hand was warm and soft, and so terribly small; he could break it without thinking. Sweating in his apprehension, his big paw was moist, and he kept letting go of her hand to wipe it on his pants. As they entered Talitha's room, he took a deep breath, afraid of what he would see and afraid of the thoughts he might have about his little girl.

  The room was warmer than he had expected, and much smaller. He had pictured it to be large, sterile-white and filled with machines and monitors that beeped or sang out shrilly with one emergency after another. Instead, there was only a single, quiet monitor and a technical-looking gadget that helped her to breathe.

  In a second, he completely forgot his terrible thoughts and visions. Instead he was overwhelmed with his genuine emotions for his daughter. These were real and he let them loose to run amok through his mind, without worry. He loved his little girl with all his heart and at that moment, she was his favorite and he would do anything for her.