The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set

by Peter Meredith

  "That wasn't me," she said aloud. "That was the other me. Will! You did something to me. Or did Amy? Did that witch put a spell on me?" She was suddenly wonderfully furious. She hated the feeling and loved it at the same time. It gave her freedom and strength. "Tell me or I blow your fuckin brains out right here!" She advanced on Will, who backed to the side of the house.

  "She didn't do anything to you, but I don't think you want to know what's happening..."

  "Hey!" the Mexican that she had shot yelled out with a quaver of pain in his voice. "Get me a phone. Get me a phone or this bitch dies."

  Will, to her amazement, tried to rush past her. With a casual strike, she sent him to his knees gasping for breath. Beneath his bruised face, he turned a very red-burgundy. The colors were fascinating.

  "Hey! I said get..."

  "We heard you, asshole," Talitha called out, angry that the man's whiny voice was disturbing her appreciation for...art. Was what she could do considered art? If not, it should be.

  "I'll kill her," he tried.

  "One more word and I'll put out your eyes." Her rage was fast becoming insurmountable.

  "Stupid bitch." The man muttered this to himself, but he might as well have whispered it directly into Talitha's ear.

  "That does it."

  She pulled her wheezing brother to his feet and dragged him inside the house. The Mexican was upstairs, moaning. The sound irritated her to no ends and she decided to put a stop to it. Her mood was black and she was simply beyond thinking.

  "Lisa?" Will called out in a raggedy voice, as Talitha drove him on toward the stairs. "Hey you, mister, is she ok?"

  "Get me a phone or I kill her."

  Will tried again between gasps, "Is she ok?" When silence greeted this, he turned to his sister. "Don't kill him, please. I need him alive. We have to find out where Amy..."

  His words didn't register in her mind. She was caught up in a rage that she hadn't felt in years, not since those early days in the asylum. All she wanted was to kill. The Mexican was in a room at the end of the hall, she could hear his heavy breathing as easily as if he were blowing his nasty bean eating breath in her face.

  She could smell that he had another gun, but she didn't care. Her brother would act as a shield, and as a battering ram. She threw him bodily against the partially open door and he fell through it stumbling to the floor. The Mexican stupidly shot at Will, but his aim, at chest height, was too high to hit the falling man and a small neat hole formed in the wall inches above Will's back.

  Talitha's aim was spot on. Though she wanted to kill him, it didn't mean she wanted it to go fast and her shot struck him in the right wrist. He screamed, but it was drowned out by a roar that ripped from her throat. Like a ferocious dog that had just slipped its collar, she was on him in a flash and over the next minute, she bludgeoned him to death with her bare hands, crushing bones and rupturing organs with every strike of her hammer like fists.

  Only when the body ceased even its involuntary twitching, did she stop punching. It had all been very satisfying, deeply so and as she straddled him, she couldn't help gyrating her pelvis a few times on the warm corpse. Feeling a wonderful contentment, she sighed largely and climbed up on the bed next to Lisa. The girl seemed very much asleep, yet Talitha knew better.

  Her brother, who had just sat up, blinked away fresh blood that dripped into his eyes; one of his stitches had loosened and sprung a leak. He seemed dazed by his impact with the door and stared at her with red-rimmed eyes. He stared and stared, and it began to affect her newly found good mood.

  "What?" she asked, it was more of a challenge than a question. His mouth came open and his head gave a little shake, but that was all.

  Just then, a very timid voice called from the doorway to the house, "Hello?" She recognized the voice as familiar, but she couldn't place it. "Hello? Will?"

  "We're upstairs," Talitha brought the gun up, sighted it on the door and waited. Her mouth hung open and she breathed light but excited.

  "Don't come in here, it's not safe," Will said in a shaking voice, looking back and forth rapidly between the gun barrel and the door.

  Now she blew out her breath, exasperated and the gun dropped back on her lap. She looked at him as if he had just spoiled a good joke. "Dang it, Will. Stop being a pain. Who is that, anyways?"

  "What are you talking about? That's Father Vogel."

  "Vogel?" The named seemed familiar, her brow came down in concentration. "The priest who was at the factory?"

  Will nodded, "Yes. Please, put the gun down. You're not right...you're thinking it's all..." He left off uncertain what to say.

  "My thinking is fine," she replied, but it wasn't, even for her it wasn't. She felt that her mind could best be described as a little warped. The killing had been fun, but now her mouth tasted like metal, and the odd memories filtering into her subconscious were distracting and aggravating. They were of things she had never done, or never would do: going to church, writing out algorithms, working on puzzles. Puzzles for God's sakes!

  "Will?" The priest was at the top of the stairs. "Is Talitha with you? Is she... ok?"

  The brother and sister locked eyes. "She's... she's, uh..." His mental state looked to be cracking like an eggshell and he stammered, "She's... she's... not injured."

  "You sound disappointed. Are you? Do you wish that Jose, over there had been a better shot?" She pointed with a tacky red index finger, to the mush that had once been a human.

  He seemed to see the man for the first time and paled, his eyes going very big. "No. No I don't wish that, but..." He stopped talking. It seemed that he needed to concentrate in order to pull his stare from the grisly thing lying in a pool of blood. "I...I...I just..."

  Father Vogel spoke up again, closer this time but still nearer to the stairs than the door, "Will, shouldn't you be doing something?"

  "What are you supposed to be doing? Saving your poor little wife?" Talitha yanked Lisa by the shoulder and she lolled like a corpse in the sea. Her head rolling on her shoulders coming to face Will. From a certain point of view, it was probably disgusting or upsetting at least, and tears began to escape from his eyes, they were pink with diluted blood.

  "I can't. I can't do it," he moaned.

  His misery had a calming effect on Talitha. The memories ceased to come to her as rapidly as they had and this put her in a benevolent mood.

  "What can't you do, Will?"

  "I was supposed to tell you...something, but I can't. We have to help Lisa first. She's alive, right?"

  Talitha looked at the girl and shrugged. "No less than usual. She was always such a stick in the mud that does it really matter. So what were you supposed to tell me?"

  "Nothing," Will cast his eyes down, staring at the carpet.

  "Will, you have to," Father Vogel called from down the hall. Closer.

  "Yeah Will, ya gotta," Talitha agreed for fun. The more miserable he looked the less strange her brain felt. "What is it ya gotta do?"

  "He has to..."

  "I was talking to my brother, Vogel. What kind of name is Vogel anyways?" She was only mildly curious. In truth she was waiting for the priest to take two more steps further down the hall, at that point he would be just outside the door. She lifted her arm, holding the gun out, sighting it at the crack of the door. The urge to peek into the room would be impossible for the man to resist.

  The floor creaked in the hall once.

  "Father, don't come any closer she has a gun..."

  Thunder erupted in the room as the gun spat out a spinning hunk of lead. It buried itself in the wall an inch from Will's right ear.

  "Will, you're such a pain in the ass, you know that?" she asked amiably; for the moment, her blood lust satiated. Will looked too stunned for words and only sat leaning against the wall while his mouth opened and closed like a fish at the bottom of a boat. Talitha smiled at him. "So what was it you were supposed to do?"

  "I...I was supposed to tell you this story, but...I don't thin
k I can."

  "What's with you and your stories? Didn't you start one earlier that you never finished?" Her brother gave her a flaccid little shrug. "Hey, I got an idea, Big Bro. You tell me a story and if I don't like it I kill Lisa." Talitha suddenly got excited at the thought. "This will be just like One-thousand and One Nights. Remember that? If the girl couldn't come up with a beguiling enough story every night, she'd die. This story thing is a great idea, Will."

  Will's pale skin went pasty white now and his eyes darted about. Clearly, he couldn't think of a thing, which only added to Talitha's excitement. Seconds ticked by and his fear was delicious.

  She thumbed the hammer back on the pistol, which got him started, but poorly so, "Remember dad, how..."

  "Of course I remember my father. It's you who obviously doesn't. If this was mom lying here all dead looking, we both know dad would come over here and take this gun, just like that," she snapped blood stained fingers, flecks of red leaping into the air as she did. "He would put an end to this nonsense right quick. I would get the paddling of a lifetime and a long-ass lecture to boot."

  "Maybe not," Will said, taking a long time to reply. "Maybe not, he wasn't always the best disciplinarian. Remember how he used to count to three when we wouldn't listen to him right away."

  "I think so," Talitha couldn't quite recall what Will was talking about and suddenly she had a moment of unease. Perhaps this story idea wasn't such a good one after all. There had been something odd about the ending of the last one, but before she put her mind to figuring it out, Will began speaking again.

  "Well, you were the reason he stopped doing that. We were at this hardware store shopping for...I don't know what. Remember that Ace by our house? The one that sold brauts and hotdogs out front? You always begged for one, when we left."

  "I remember the hotdogs." The smell of those long ago hotdogs came to her and it suddenly made her hungry. Will seemed to read her mind.

  "Just thinking about them is making my stomach growl. But they really weren't all that good. It was the smell that drove us nuts, not the taste. They were usually overcooked and the buns were dry as sawdust." Will paused and Talitha nodded; the picture he was describing was very familiar. Now that he had begun his story, it seemed easier for him to go on, "This one time you were playing on a display of plastic door mats inside the store. You know the ones with the fake stubby grass and the white and yellow daisy in the corner?"

  It was a rhetorical question, but she nodded all the same. Their family had at least one of those mats outside their house for years.

  Will waited for the small nod from her before he wiped his wet nose with his sleeve and picked up where he left off, "Well, they had this big stack of them, three stacks actually. They looked like stairs to us and you were playing on them, even though they slipped and shifted around beneath you. You know how mom was back then, everything was dangerous to her. She said 'Get off there or you'll break your neck.' But you didn't listen and then dad steps in, 'Tal! I'm going to count to three!' Well, all you did was smile huge as if daring him to start counting."

  "That was me? That doesn't sound like how I used to be." She couldn't quite remember, but she had always thought of herself as too straight laced to do anything like what Will was saying.

  "I'm pretty sure that was you," Will replied and now his voice was more hopeful. "Anyways, dad puts on his mean face and says, all important sounding, 'one'. You only grinned bigger, because you had a plan brewing to outsmart him, which is funny because you were like three years old at the time. So dad scowls even fiercer and says even louder, 'TWO'. At this, your eyes are huge and mischievous and you get into a squatting position. Your plan is to leap up the second dad begins to say three. And he knows this and doesn't know what to do, because he will end up looking kinda stupid being outsmarted by a three year old. Mom starts to die laughing and a second later dad looks like a balloon that just lost its air."

  Suddenly Talitha did recall this in full detail. It just mushroomed whole into her mind. "That wasn't me that was Katie."

  "Oh, you're probably right," Will replied quickly as if this was a minor point. "Katie did always have a special something about her that kept her out of trouble. Remember the time she tried to make jello in the toilet?"

  Talitha smiled at that crazy memory. The little blonde girl had boiled five gallons of water and had slowly poured it into the toilet all the while stirring in six or seven packets of Jello. She had let it set overnight and then purposely kept the second floor bathroom occupied so that her father would get a weird surprise in the morning. Coming out of the bathroom, his face was priceless.

  "For a little girl, she was brilliant at getting into trouble and genius at getting out of it again," Talitha said shaking her head. She then looked at the gun in her hand and then around at the room, confused and with growing fright. "Will, I think I'm back."

  Chapter 14

  Will

  "Will, I think I'm back," Talitha announced in a shaky voice; her words were quiet and full of shame and thumped into his pounding head as if they were rocks coming from her mouth. Her first act was to put the gun down gingerly on the stand next to the bed, she then reached over and touched her sister-in-law, "She's alive, and so is the baby."

  "Oh God," Will was up in a flash, but his head was none too stable and he tottered for a moment as the room swayed. He stumbled and lurched around the bed to his wife who, despite what Talitha had said, lay apparently dead to the world. Gently he shook her. "Lisa! Lisa!" he called, soft yet urgently. His eyes brimmed with sudden tears. "Vogel, get in here!" Fear caused his words to come out as a harsh order.

  The priest rushed in, white faced, but otherwise cool and collected; he too went to the blonde and began a brief examination. He lifted her eyelids, opened her mouth, took her pulse, ran his hands over her head and neck, and then down her spine. Next, he checked her abdomen and chest, after that he just shrugged.

  "I don't know what's wrong with her," he said lamely. "We need to get her to a hospital."

  "Call nine-one-one, there's a phone in the master bedroom, the first door just to your left in the hall," Will commanded, roughly giving the priest a shove toward the door.

  "Father Vogel, wait," Talitha hopped up to intercept the priest grabbing him by the arm. "Can't you smell that? Amy wasn't lying, there's been witchcraft performed in here. It's very strong on Lisa."

  The last twenty-four hours for Will had been long and full of pain, his mind felt drained and stuporous. "Right, what was I thinking? Can you look at her?" he asked his sister.

  "Me? I'm not a witch," she replied, backing toward the wall.

  "Please?" Will begged.

  "I guess...I guess I can try." Talitha went to the girl and bent so low over her face that for a moment Will thought she was going to kiss Lisa. Instead, Talitha closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nostrils. They wrinkled in disgust. "There's something here." Lisa wore a purple sweater that rode high up on her neck due to the way she was laying. Talitha pulled down the warm material and stepped back. "You didn't give her that did you?"

  Around her neck, Lisa wore a strange necklace. It was of laced twine and odd fragrant flowers, small discs of what looked like hammered dimes hung from it.

  "No. Do you think I should take it off of her?" Will knew next to nothing about witchcraft. Talitha shrugged, and when he looked at the priest, Father Vogel appeared even more lost. Will doubted it would do any more damage if he did and so with a quick motion, he yanked the necklace off his wife.

  Quite literally, thousands of images flashed through his mind in the space of the next few seconds. They came so fast that none was able to actually register on his consciousness. Along with the images there was stinging burning pain in his eyes as if he had looked into a laser and he forced them closed, yet still the pictures came.

  "UHHGG!" Will cried out. They were a blur, a machine gun of lights, faster than any strobe. In seconds, his balance went and he swayed a moment before
falling over, but strong hands gripped him and gently lowered him to the floor.

  "Will, are you ok?" He knew his sister would ask this.

  "Will, are you ok?" she asked.

  At first he could do little, save moan and roll back and forth on the floor, but then the visions began to slow in pace and when his sister repeated her question, something he knew that she'd do, he was able to nod. Finally, a last image of a man stayed in his mind. It was of a very big Mexican with tattoos running up his neck, he had the eyes of a puff adder, hooded and poisonous, they stared at him.

  "What happened?" He knew Father Vogel would say.

  "What happened?" the priest asked like an echo.

  "Please be quiet for a moment," Will begged, holding out his hand to them. He attempted to open his eyes, however double images surrounded him, he was seeing the room a second into the future. This was layered over the image of the room in the present and it was disorienting as well as nauseating. A few moments later, he tried again and the double images wavered, blurred, and then fused into one.

  "I...I think I just got my vision back, you know my second sight. I think that thing around her neck was like a charm keeping me from seeing what was happening here. How's Lisa? Did breaking that necklace do anything for her?" he asked, trying to get up.

  "I'm sorry, but there's no change," Vogel replied. "Do you think it's possible Amy Harris has used your wife to open a gate into the Void with a spell? Weren't you in a similar state, Talitha?"

  "No, it's not the same spell. Feel her skin; she's not at all cold. And look around us, there's no demon about. This is something different...move over." Talitha again sniffed Lisa thoroughly. She shocked Will by next running her finger along Lisa's gums and then she stuck her own finger in her mouth. "She hasn't been poisoned or drugged."

  "What about the other Talitha?" Will asked. "Would she know what this is? I think we should ask her."