The Meridians

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Not that he was silent, no, for he maintained a steady chant throughout the entire process.

  "Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to kill Scott...." And on and on, an unstopping litany of death and terror that her son was singing into her ear.

  She grabbed her car keys off the small hook above the kitchen sink where she always kept them, then maneuvered Kevin so she could hold him with one hand, and with the other she grabbed his laptop. She did not know why she grabbed the device, not consciously, at any rate. But there was definitely something within her that said having it would be not only important, but critical in the time ahead.

  She ran with her son into the night - thank the Lord it was still summer, if it had been winter the entire process would have been delayed by a need to get coat and shoes for him, not to mention cool-weather garb for herself - and got them both into the car. Normally she put Kevin in the backseat, because it was safer for a child to travel there. But not tonight. Tonight she put him in the front passenger seat, for she felt that he would be her navigator.

  She only hoped that she would be able to understand his directions when - if - they came.

  She put the car in reverse and pulled out of the driveway, moving so quickly that the car bounced, scraping the bottom of the chassis against the curb when she rolled over the small lip of the driveway into the street.

  She then put the car into drive and - not having anywhere else to go - began to drive toward Scott's house.

  Kevin was rocking in the seat, a jerky back and forth motion that sickened her. He looked manic, terrified.

  "Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to -"

  And then the words cut off and again she heard that terrible, terrible screaming that she had heard in his room earlier. A finger came into view, pointing off to the right, but she didn't have the nerve to look at her son, for she feared that she would again see two of him. Two Kevins superimposed one over another, one of them rocking back and forth and saying "Gray man's going to kill Scott" in an almost sing-song, the other one looking at once more intellectually capable and more terrifying for the simplicity of the scream he was issuing forth.

  Lynette, terrified out of her mind, spun the wheel to the right, and the shrieking stopped.

  "Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going...."

  She drove less than a half block before the scream returned, flying out of her son - or her son's doppleganger - with such force that she thought the windows and mirrors in the car must crack in a spiderweb of pressure breaks.

  But the windows held, the mirrors maintained their integrity. And the scream continued.

  She glanced to her side again, again looking only far enough to make out a pointing hand. The sight of that alone almost undid her: the hand went from solid to translucent before her eyes, as though her son were phasing in and out of her reality...or she was phasing in and out of his.

  Who is real? she wondered briefly. Will I wake up in an institution tomorrow? Is any of this really happening?

  But even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. The boy in the car was Kevin...and so was the other boy. Somehow she was seeing two versions of her son, one that had existed with her since birth and another one that was coming from...where?

  To this she had no answer.

  And the scream continued.

  She again turned the wheel in line with the pointing hand beside her. This time however, the wail continued. And now she could hear two sets of voices speaking.

  "Gray man's going to kill Scott, gray man's going to kill Scott..."

  "He's here, mommy, he's here he's here he's here!"

  "Gray man's going to kill Scott, gray man's going to kill Scott..."

  "He's going to die, mommy, we have to stop him!"

  And on and on they went, the gruesome chorus of death-wails so bright and horrific that they shook her brain in its skull and threatened to shake her sanity free with it.

  "Gray man's going to kill..."

  "He's here, he's going to die..."

  Lynette finally clapped her hands over her ears, unable to take it anymore. "Stop it!" she shrieked. "Stop it, Kevin, stop it!"

  And the silence that greeted her was more deafening than the tumult had been.

  A single finger, wavering in and out of insubstantiality, pointed beside her. She did not look at the body or the face of the boy beside her. She was for the first time afraid of her son, and what he was. She was for the first time aware that he was truly different. And not in the "oh he's so precious" way that some people attributed to him, but different from her in some deep and fundamental way, a difference that perhaps sprang from his autism, but also went far beyond it.

  Her son wrote about string theory - and critiqued it at the age of nine years old.

  Her son threw tantrums - and saved lives in doing so.

  Her son sat beside her in the car - and her son also lived in the spaces between this dimension and some other place, some place where he was not autistic, where he did not suffer from the developmental disabilities that plagued him on this plane of his existence.

  She followed the pointing finger of her son/not-son, and saw Scott's car.

  It was parked at the mouth of an alley. The alley itself seemed to shimmer and sway in front of her, as though it was made not of brick and concrete, but something more ephemeral, a dream of an alley, but not the substance thereof. The passage between the buildings was dark, moving, shadows flitting across its mouth like living creatures, like the souls of the damned.

  "I can't go there," she said. "I'm afraid."

  And beside her, the boy she refused to look at whispered, "Gray man's going to kill Scott, Mommy. Going to kill Scott forever."

  That finally moved her. She moved to unlock her seat belt, to get out of the car, and found that she was shaking so badly she couldn't unlatch the safety device. She hitched in a deep breath, cursing herself for a weakling, but managed to slow the jittering of her hands enough that she was finally able to depress the red button that let the seat belt unlatch.

  The doorhandle was the next hurdle. Not that she couldn't grab it, she knew she had the gross motor control necessary to pull the handle and get out of the car. But rather she simply didn't have the nerve to reach out and touch it. She was beside something that was both her son and not her son, sitting next to a being who was both crippled and able to function at a level beyond her, a being that made her tremble with fear. But still the car was a cocoon of safety in the strange wilderness that this night had turned into.

  Her house had been invaded by a stranger. The stranger now sat beside her in her own car. How much worse then, how much more fraught with strange doings and danger, would the world be away from her possessions, away from the very limited areas she could claim as her own?

  But.... "Gray man's going to kill Scott."

  She couldn't live with that. Not after having lost Robbie, she couldn't lose the kind man with the scarred face but perfectly whole heart. She couldn't lose another special man.

  She couldn't lose another man she loved.

  Lynette grasped the handle of the door with newfound courage, with a strength she did not know she had possessed.

  She opened the door.

  It cracked open with a shriek that sounded far too loud in her ears, and at the same moment the boy/boys beside her fell silent, as though the need for silence for the first time in these latest minutes was overriding the need for speech, for screaming, for the voice of fear.

  Silence gripped her with its all-encompassing embrace. The night seemed shallow and dim, a faithless reproduction of reality into which all the details of a normal Meridian street had not been included. No birds tweeted in the night, no babies cried in the distance, no dogs barked behind dark hedgerows.

  As though giving voice to her observations, one of the versions of the boy in the car spoke. "All is silent, all is deep, all the world is fast asleep." Then the voice
dropped into a whisper. "Hurry, Mommy. Gray man's going to kill Scott. Going to kill Scott. Going to kill him and gut him and rip him up and make him be gone forever."

  Lynette felt tears sting behind her eyes, fear so concentrated within her that it had to find some physical avenue of escape and so was causing her to weep. She wiped the tears away. She did not have time for them.

  Her boy - or the boy that her boy had become - inhaled to speak again, but Lynette knew that if she heard that strange whisper one more time, if she heard any more horrific predictions about Scott's fate, she would lose her nerve. So before Kevin could speak, she got out of the car as quickly and quietly as possible and pulled the door shut behind her.

  She was alone in this place, a solitary figure in this cruel version of a kind world.

  She crept toward Scott's car.

  Not toward the alley, don't think of the alley, don't go there, she thought. Just go to the car, just get to the car, just get to the -

  And at that moment a shot rang out. It sounded far away, distant as a shot echoing through a vast mountain range, impossible to pinpoint with her ears. But she knew instinctively where the sound had come from.

  The alley. It had come from the alley.

  Still she moved to the car first. She looked inside it, half-expecting to find Scott there, dead, a gruesome victim of Mr. Gray's talents.

  There was nothing. Only the keys, still hanging from the steering column, and the glove box hanging open, the small light inside it illuminating the car's interior just enough to highlight the fact that she could barely see anything at all inside it.

  But she could see enough. She could see that Scott was not inside the car. She could see she would have to look elsewhere to find the man who had come into her life so suddenly and become such an important part of it so completely.

  She dropped to her knees beside the car, looking over the hood and trying to pierce the darkness of the alleyway beyond. It was no use. She couldn't see anything past the open mouth of the alley. It was as though the passage was some kind of creature that sucked light into it, a black hole in downtown Meridian, a singularity such as the one that had caused the universe to exist. Only this singularity brought not a big bang and life, but the harsh ring of a gunshot, and inevitable death.

  Lynette crept around the side of the car, and then danced, catlike, to the alley opening. She stepped across the threshold of the alleyway, knowing that she was also stepping across something more solid and dangerous than the mere line of demarcation between a street and its offshoot, but knowing also that if she hesitated, Scott would be lost.

  And there he was. Kneeling. Kneeling in front of...

  The gray man.

  Mr. Gray.

  Death come to visit, come to call again, come to steal from her another love, another life.

  Mr. Gray was standing in front of Scott, his back to her thank goodness, that was one small blessing in this horrific night. But he was holding a gun to Scott's head. Not so good.

  The two were speaking.

  "You're a champion screwup, Mr. Gray," said Scott, his tone one of defiance in the face of certain death that made Lynette want to shout out, to comfort him. But she held her tongue.

  "Mr. Gray?" said the killer. "I rather like that. Mr. Gray."

  "I started out with Mr. Shitforbrains, but it took too long to say," said Scott.

  "No, I've always been Mr. Gray to you, haven't I? Always the man who killed your family. Always the man who was destined to kill you." Mr. Gray looked around then, and Lynette barely had time to throw herself behind a trash barrel before he spotted her.

  "Not much time left," she heard Mr. Gray say. "So I guess I won't get to reproduce history exactly after all. But it's the end of a story that people remember anyway, isn't it?"

  And Lynette knew that this was the moment. This was the moment that her son - and her son's twin - had warned her of. "Gray man's going to kill Scott," she whispered to herself, and cast around desperately for some way to stop what she knew was going to happen.

  Time slowed down until she felt as though she could hear the individual blood cells flowing through her veins, each one bouncing off the walls of her bloodways like a sea of life dashing itself against the shoals and shallows of her body.

  She moved like the moon across the night, neither thinking nor acting on instinct. She simply was in the next instant, sweeping a piece of wood from a broken pallet into her hands. She cradled the wood in her hands, and rushed without sound at the gray man.

  Scott's eyes were closed.

  Mr. Gray had his back to her.

  Neither man knew she was there.

  She made no sound. She was the moon. Silent, moving across the night sky of this nightmare alley with inevitability and unstoppable purpose.

  "I am the moon," she whispered.

  And the gray man turned.

  "What the -" he began.

  But before he could finish the thought, his body was already moving, turning fully toward her, the gun in his hand swinging around to point at her.

  Time was still slow, the blood still pounded in her.

  I am the moon, she thought.

  And with that thought, she screamed a scream that ricocheted off the walls of the alleyway like a spent bullet, and swung the length of wood in her hands.

  It hit the gray man square across the face, and saw his nose explode as the board broke across it.

  Mr. Gray shrieked a wordless cry, and tried to bring the gun to bear on her. He fired it, over and over, and she felt bullets whip past her, burning the air with their passage like a flight of bees that had been set aflame and left to destroy all in their path.

  But none of the bees touched her. She felt them go past so close that the hairs on her head and arms singed with their passing, but none of the bees stung her, none found its mark.

  Of course not, she thought insanely, I'm the moon. And she giggled, a high-pitched wheeze that frightened her as much as anything else that had happened this night.

  Click, click, click went the gun as the killer before her pulled the trigger on an empty magazine. But still he pulled the trigger, blood splashed into his eyes, and now she knew how he had gotten his nose crushed, but that was impossible, wasn't it, because it had just happened now, so how had he sported the wounds of this night before?

  She had no time to ponder the impossibility of it all, because in that moment she relinquished control of herself, falling to her knees as though she had spent all her energy and courage and strength in the single act of defiance against the killer.

  She had saved Scott.

  And now Scott returned the favor, springing to his feet in the same moment that she fell from hers, and he grabbed her wrist, and screamed "RUN!" and yanked her with him.

  They ran.

  She was the moon, and she ran.

  She looked behind her, into the alleyway as they left it, and saw Mr. Gray, still reeling from the strike that had shattered his nose, blood dripping from his face.

  But she noted with almost detached interest that the blood disappeared before it touched the ground. It dripped from his face, and fell into eternity.

  "You bitch," screamed Mr. Gray, his voice bubbling around the phantom blood that was spurting from his face. "You bitch, I'll find you, I'll kill you I'll kill you and your boy and Cowley I'll kill all of you forever, forever you hear!"

  And then Scott yanked her away from the alley and she lost sight of him.

  The moon has left the building, she thought, and giggled again.

  "Stay with me, Lynette," said Scott.

  He pulled her, tripping over her own feet, to her car.

  "No!" she screamed, in that instant not wanting to get in, not wanting to see the two boys in the car.

  But Scott paid her no heed, paid her no mind, simply opened the back door and threw her bodily inside and then closed the door behind her.

  He got in the front, then, and put the still-running car in gear.

 
; A hand touched her in the darkness, and she almost shrieked, almost fainted as the terror that she had not felt in those critical seconds in the alley now washed over her and crushed her beneath it.

  I am not the moon, she thought.

  The hand belonged to her son. Kevin touched her hand, but did not look at her.

  And that was right. He was one again, he was her son again.

  Scott gunned the engine, and then sped off into the night, leaving his car and the alley behind them.

  But not Mr. Gray, she knew. Mr. Gray was not dead, and so he would be back.

  That was the nature of nightmares. They always came back.

  ***

  34.

  ***

  Scott was more than a little worried that he was going to lose Lynette.

  She was huddled in the back of the car, whispering "I am the moon" over and over to herself, and try as he might he could elicit no other response from her no matter what he said.

  He looked over at Kevin. The boy was in his pajamas, looking out at the dead of the night as they drove. "You okay, son?" asked Scott. Kevin did not reply, but held out a single small hand, his thumb up.

  "Good," said Scott. "At least that makes one of us."

  He drove as fast as he could, not driving with any destination in mind, but solely with the goal of putting as many miles between them and that damned alley as he could.

  He adjusted the rearview mirror so that he could look at Lynette's form, dark and curled in on itself in the back of the car. "Lynette," he said. No response. "Lynette?"

  "I am the moon," she whispered.

  "Nice to meet you, Miss Moon," he answered back. "Could you let Lynette know I called?"

  He didn't mean to be sarcastic, and certainly didn't want to be nasty to Lynette. After all, she had just saved his life, and at great risk to her own safety. But he needed her present, not locked away in a fear-induced coma of some kind.

  He reached into the back seat with one hand, fumbling around until he touched Lynette's own hand. He clutched at it. "Lynette," he said again. "Honey, come back to us, we need you." She didn't speak, but after a moment, he felt her hand come alive in his, holding it back in a tight grip. He felt like their joined hands were a source of sudden heat in the cool of this dark night, warming him from the inside out, giving him a sense of hope for the first time since Mr. Gray had appeared in the street outside the alley.