The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set

by Peter Meredith

  Their waitress leaned back as if he had leprosy. "Anything else?"

  "No thank you, Tracy. I think we have all that we need," he replied. Her name had popped into his head as if they had been introduced. She looked shocked all of a sudden, and her eyes narrowed at him searching his face. Her nametag read Meg.

  "Do I know you?" she asked quietly.

  "I'm an old acquaintance of your mother's." It was all Will could think of and it sounded strange even to him since the waitress looked just a couple of years younger than he.

  "Ok...sure. Enjoy," she nodded at their food and turned away still with a skeptical look. He knew she was on her way to call her mother.

  "Crap," he murmured to his sister. "We might want to eat quick. She's going to call her mother right now." He checked his watch. The slow hand of time was still against him, one-hundred and ninety-six minutes left.

  Talitha had her eyes squinted in concentration. "I can hear her..." She paused and suddenly tense lines of hate distorted her pretty face. "That whore-bitch just called you gruesome. I should go..."

  "Talitha, hey!" Will hissed at his sister. She had been very loud. "Look at me. Look at me."

  "What?" She seemed unsure of herself and looked around in puzzlement. "Did I just use the word whore-bitch? Did I?" She was close to tears again.

  "Yes, please quite down." People had turned to look at her.

  "That just popped out, I didn't mean it," she explained. "It was like listening to someone else say those words. Will, I'm in trouble. I'm going to be her. I am her! Oh my God...I killed a lady once with a hammer...or did she? I don't know. Did I do that or was it her?"

  "Shush, please. It was her. It was her, you'd never do something like that." Clearly, Will wasn't convincing his sister. Talitha's eyes grew wider and wider as memories came to her. He tried a different tact, "Talitha...what is eighty-one squared."

  "Uh, uh nine."

  "No, I said squared."

  "Oh...sixty-four hundred...sixty-five hundred and sixty-one." She looked at him to see if that was the correct figure. He had no idea, but he had her more focused.

  "Good job. Now listen to me. You are the good Talitha. Trust me; I can tell the two of you apart, you haven't called me names since last night." He tried to smile as he said this, but her look was too forlorn. "You want memories? I've got some good ones. When you were three years old, you were already practically a lawyer. This one time, mom told you not to play in the street and later, there you were sitting in the street with your dolls. She started to yell, but you calmly pointed out that you were actually playing in the gutter, not the street itself. She gave you that look... you know the one, where she takes a deep breath while shaking her head like she wants to say something but she just doesn't know what. Eventually she says very clearly, I want you to stay on the side walk."

  Talitha was looking at him in the most delightful way, just then. He pointed to her food. "Eat your pizza. So, we were playing, I forget what, and once again you were out in the street and mom comes up and she really starts yelling at you." He paused to take a gargantuan bite of his pizza.

  "What happened?"

  "Mom yells, what did I tell you about staying on the sidewalk? And your reply was, I am on the sidewalk, look. Although most of you was in the street, you still had one foot on the sidewalk and you said, I never left it. After that mom always had to spell out her instructions, just in case."

  "I did that?" She smiled and for a few seconds it warmed the brown of her eyes. After the story, Talitha seemed to calm considerably and they ate quietly. This was just fine with Will since he was too famished to tell too many more stories just then.

  After he had eaten half the pizza, he asked her, "Tal, can you do me a favor and try to destroy those memories? Isn't it worth a shot?"

  She shook her head. "I've been thinking about this and I have to tell you that it's not worth a shot. The brain is far beyond even my abilities. Remember that old saying, if a million monkeys typed for a million years, one would produce the works of Shakespeare?" she asked. He gave her a little noncommittal shrug in return. "The complexity of the brain is such, that what you're suggesting would be like having a single monkey build a typewriter from scratch, learn English and then type out Hamlet. It's impossible."

  "Not really. If you can find a monkey that can build typewriters, I bet the rest would be a snap."

  She didn't smile. "You have to realize that memories aren't exactly named, or color-coded. They're enmeshed in everything we are...our personalities, our thoughts and feeling, are all shaped by our memories. And monkeying around with them is filled with so many hazards that I couldn't even name them all."

  He peeked at his watch, they had one hour and twenty minutes until their flight was scheduled to take off. "Then what are we going to do? You know Lisa's predicament. You know what the evil Tal wanted to do to her...and my baby."

  A case of the shivers struck her, it was a long roll of her muscles down her back. "I know what she wanted to do. She wanted to...to box up the rest of the pizza." Her face unfurled into a broken looking grin.

  "Huh?" Will asked perplexed.

  "I'll getchya a box," Tracy/Meg the waitress had come up suddenly, stealthily. She left just as quiet.

  Talitha glared at the girl as she walked away. It was a feral look that only became more so when she bared her teeth suddenly. "That little cunt was trying to eavesdrop. Can you believe that shit? Somebody should do her a favor and yank all that stupid hair out by the roots!"

  The restaurant went silent.

  The word cunt had so startled Will that he had sat speechless as Talitha had gone on in a loud voice that had carried as far back as the kitchen. Quickly he dug into his wallet and dropped three twenties onto the table.

  3

  "Fuck you, bitch!" Tracy/Meg screamed from the doorway of the pizza place. Behind her was a throng of angry Italians.

  Thankfully, just at the moment, Will was peeling away at the station wagon's top speed. For a few precious seconds, just long enough to pull her to the car, Talitha had seemed stunned by her own outburst. Now she seethed.

  "I know where she works, Will! When we're done with Amy, I'm coming right back here," her face was marble in its hardness.

  "Tal, stop it, please. What's the square root two-thousand..."

  "Who gives a fuck about square roots? Do I look like a fuckin calculator to you?" She yanked her hair back into a quick braid. Her hands pulling hard were punishing her scalp.

  Will began to feel an awful desperation growing in him. His sister was fast becoming a time bomb and he needed her whole and sane. "You're not trying hard enough, Tal! Please fight this, you've got to be tougher."

  Practically since he had woken up, he had been hoping for a vision concerning Lisa, a hint, a clue as to what he should do, but instead he saw Talitha reach for the gun between the seats.

  Yet even with the vision, he knew he'd be too slow. There had been too little warning. Her hand was a blur and a fraction of a second later he felt the cold steel pressing against his cheek.

  "Let me pull over first," he whispered, keeping his hands at the ten and two position on the wheel. They were sweating so badly that he worried that he would slip and drive into one of the parked cars lining the street.

  "I remember I used to want to kill you, when you had the impudence to order me about," as she spoke, she drilled the gun into his face. It hurt. His flesh was still terribly sore from his beating at her hands only the day before.

  "You don't wish to kill me now?" It was a small spark of hope, but it was all he had.

  She laughed cruelly. "I want to kill you now more than ever. You did something to me. I don't really know what. I only know that now there's a demon in the Void wearing my face. Ruling where I should be ruling. Hurting those I want to hurt."

  Will again wished for a vision, instead he got the sound of the hammer of the gun drawing back in his ear.

  Chapter 8

  Talitha

>   A fury burned a fire within her, blotting out the sound of screaming. The screaming was far away, as if from another time or another mind. She couldn't tell which it was or whether it was both at once. However, it didn't really matter. Of all the beings she hated, and there was quite a list, none deserved death more than Will Jern. And no amount of screaming and begging echoing in her psyche would stay her hand another second.

  Except that she did pause. The begging sounded familiar and after a second, she realized that it was Talitha begging for her not to pull the trigger. But...but, she was Talitha, or at least that's what she used to call herself, before. And then she called herself...Ba'al. That's right, she remembered. Her name had been Ba'al Fie-ere, denier of Ba'al. But when was that, she didn't know.

  Her mind, rocking and swimming in confusion though it was, was well made up on one thing at least. Her brother would have to die. Simply the fact that he had beaten her twice, once physically in hand to hand combat and once mentally with his deceitful exorcism, meant that he was a living embarrassment to her. She thumbed the hammer back, and as she did, a low trickle of sweat crept meekly from his hairline at his temple.

  It made her smile. "Any last words?"

  "If you don't mind, I wanted to tell you a final story. It won't take long. When I was five years old and you were four, we used to play that game with the lava monsters, remember?"

  Unbelievably, she nodded. She put off his death for another moment as she recalled that time, running and jumping over the sidewalks, which back then seemed so unbelievably wide. Was it always summer when they had been children together, it felt so. Always warm and sunny.

  Will had nervous eyes and they slipped toward her, briefly, fearfully. She liked that and let him go on, prolonging the moment, "That day we were playing over by the Davidson's house. I don't know what we were thinking. Timmy Davidson had been grounded and couldn't come out to play and there we were right beneath his window, laughing and screaming, 'Look out! The lava-monster!' With him sitting looking all mopey. You had pigtails in your hair that day, with yellow yarn tying back each. I remember you had on a yellow turtleneck and brown cords. It's like a picture in my mind. You jumping over the bricks, with the green-green grass behind you, framing everything."

  Talitha sat in the car, frozen in place, remembering this moment in the past only as it unfolded from Will's lips. She didn't know what was to come and her curiosity kept her finger a hair's breathe from finishing the pull on the trigger of the gun. It hadn't wavered an inch.

  "We were both barefoot you and I. Didn't it seem as if we were always barefoot back then? Perhaps it made the prospect of touching the lava that much more exciting." He shrugged as if that little observation didn't matter. "Either way, you were giggling up a storm all along and your mood must have affected Timmy, because he started playing with us from up in his room. Right behind you Tal, run! He'd scream down. We ran and jumped over the sidewalks and Timmy kept directing back and forth until we were all out of breathe and then Mrs. Davidson came. Timothy Nathaniel Davidson! What are you doing? You're supposed to be grounded." Will's voice was way up high and Talitha suddenly remembered Mrs. Davidson, a small woman with a big voice. It carried up and down the block when she was upset with her son, which was frequent.

  "His mom scared Timmy so bad he almost fell out of the window. She yanked him back in and then she turned to glare down at us...do you remember what you said to her?"

  "No," she was clueless.

  "You suddenly point up at her and scream, Run Willy J a lava-monster has gotten Timmy! Oh my God that was the funniest thing! We both took off, laughing our heads off because of the look Mrs. Davidson had on her face."

  Talitha smiled at the image. "That's a cute story. Did it have a point past keeping you alive for a few more seconds?"

  Will gave her a little shrug. "I wasn't done. So there we were running back home, but we were so weak from laughter and from the lava-monster game that we were practically stumbling and we weren't watching where exactly we were going. You have to remember that German-shepherd that lived between us and the Davidson's."

  Talitha did indeed. In her mind, its teeth were four inch long curved sabers and it could open its mouth wide enough to half swallow her. It was a nightmare dog, and the legend of it in her mind was probably pitiful compared to its actual ferocity.

  "That day we accidentally walked into its ring of death." He gave her a knowing look around the pistol. Though the rest of the story opened up in her memory only as it went along, she recalled quite clearly the ring of death. It wasn't something she would enter even on a dare.

  Will went on, "The dog's name was Nancy. How stupid is that? I couldn't think of a worse name for such a beast as that even if I tried. It ran around on a chain and cut a perfect circle in the grass, a dirt path that meant certain doom to anyone foolish enough to cross its boundary. That day you walked right over it without thinking."

  "I don't remember this at all," Talitha murmured shaking her head in slight way. The gun in her hand was now forgotten. It had fallen into her lap and she couldn't even feel her fingers around its grip.

  "It's true. We were just laughing away and didn't hear Nancy charging at us. She was always so silent...but that look in her eyes, yeesh." Will paused as his body became racked with shivers. "She came at you and I swear she could've swallowed you in one giant bite. Her mouth looked to open a foot and a half, but at the last second, I saw her and pulled you back. Those freaking giant teeth came down with this really loud snap an inch from your face." Will puffed out his cheeks and blew long and slow.

  "Huh," Talitha nodded a series of small little nods, suddenly remembering that moment with amazing clarity. Nancy's teeth, curved and wickedly sharp were a beautiful white, as if they were polished on a daily basis. They came together with a clicking sound and when they did, a large huff of her breathe struck Talitha in the face. It was hot and wet, and it stank of aged garbage.

  "I remember that. I thought my heart had stopped in my chest," she paused a moment feeling that fear from so long ago come back to life. It felt so real, almost as if it had just happened.

  "I..." Just then, she looked down, becoming mystified. "Will, what are we doing in the car? And why am I holding this?" She held out the gun, with shaking hands. The last thing she had remembered was hearing someone approach the table at the restaurant and then she was there in the car, listening to the story of Nancy and the lava-monsters feeling extremely confused. Part of her confusion was the low burn of anger that was even then draining away from her. She'd been so monstrously angry just a few moments before, but now she couldn't understand why.

  Will reached out and took the gun from her. "You are...how do I put this? The other Talitha, the one I thought I banished, or exorcized I mean, is back. Or maybe it never left."

  "No she's gone," Talitha implored. "She has to be gone. I would feel her in me. I would know it!"

  Will put the car in drive and sped off into the rain. "I don't know what to say. I know her better than you do and it was definitely her. I don't think it's a memory issue you're dealing with."

  She didn't know what to say either. Odd memories flashed through her mind. In one, she was masturbating in bed expressing her pleasure with embarrassingly loud moans. In another, she was talking to a doctor from the asylum, pretending to be sane, trying to lure him just a little closer so she could get at him with her teeth. A third saw her outside a home, one that was set way back in the woods. A man stood near a fireplace in the living room and she couldn't decide whether to kill him or rape him.

  "Talitha come on, I can't leave you here alone," Will said, his voice was a combination of stress and fatigue.

  They were parked outside the wreck of the factory. "How did we get here so fast? We were just..." They had just been by the pizza place only a second before.

  "What do you mean? It wasn't that fast. But come on, I want to get you some new clothes before we go to the airport. So we got to grab the priest and hu
stle. Are you still doing ok?" He wiggled his fingers at his own head.

  "Yes, it's still me in here," she replied, attempting, but failing at giving him a smile. Talitha climbed out of the car feeling a nervous thrill in her stomach. She had barely blinked and they had been at the factory. Had she been daydreaming, or perhaps concentrating on those old/new memories so much that she missed the entire car ride? She didn't think so. Time had just snapped by in way she couldn't describe.

  Before her the entrance to the factory was a black nightmare against the cold grey rain. Portions of its charred walls still stood three stories up into the gloom. She barely gave these a glance, what concerned her was below them. Deep in the black pits of the building were nine corpses.

  "Did you hear that?" she asked her brother. He had to have. It had been plenty loud. A scream had come up from the depths of the factory. A man's scream of horrid pain. It was Father Alba's voice.

  "No, I didn't hear anything. What was it?" Will had his head cocked to the side listening.

  "It's..."

  Father Alba sounded like he was being tortured. As if his eyes were being torn from their sockets. One of her new memories came back to her and on impulse, she tentatively gave the air a sniff. The smell of the priest was distant and fading, he wasn't in the building, and hadn't been since the day before. Just like that the scream seemed to die away.

  Had it even been there in the first place? The scream had sounded so real when she first heard it, but now only seconds later it was more an echo in her mind.

  "It's nothing. Just something settling, I think," she lied. Will's brows came down, he didn't fully believe her, all the same he turned back to the entrance.

  Steam or smoke wafted up from it making it look eerie, reminding her of another doorway she had been through once. That one she had to be dragged into. How she screamed so hysterically! That one entered upon the crypt of Jubal and it was the first time Talitha had sent her to be tortured in her place.