The Eye of Madness

  “I suppose it wasn’t in my cards to find a more handsome host,” he said.

  “Do you have any questions?” Burt asked.

  “Yes, where would I find a red light and a green light? In my day, a red light signified an area of ill repute. A green light, well, I think it meant the coast was clear … I never paid attention to such things.”

  “Let’s stick to the basics,” Burt said. “You can read, can’t you?”

  Musial folded his arms scornfully. “Of course I can!” he snapped. “Do you think just because I was a magician it means I am an uneducated, illiterate prat?”

  “Good,” Burt said, ignoring his wounded tone. He was certain that Musial was not upset at all, only toying with him. “As I said, keep it simple, keep it slow and remember the basics.”

  Charlotte drew a makeshift map on a piece of notebook paper. While the vehicle had GPS, they decided it would be too complicated to teach Musial to use it, not to mention it would waste valuable time. They were not sure if GPS would work in the storm either. Musial walked back down the hill and retrieved the SUV while Burt lay back down on the grass. The vehicle was undamaged except for a few scratches and a dent on the rear bumper.

  Once he pulled in front of the cabin, they loaded all the empty gas canisters in the back. They also included an assortment of canning jars and containers from the kitchen. They packed anything capable of holding gasoline. Barring a miracle, this would be their one and only chance for procuring fuel. They just hoped they could collect enough to outlast the eye of the storm. How much they would need, God only knew.

  Burt gave a few more last minute instructions, which went ignored, then Musial left with a wise remarks. “See you in a few days.” He then sped away clumsily. He still didn’t seem to have the full grasp of acceleration. Even when he was gone from view, they could still hear the revving of the engine.

  “Do you think he will come back?” Derrick asked.

  Cecil shrugged. “I don’t know, but we didn’t have much choice.”

  “I think he will,” Burt said as he squeezed Sally and Cecil’s shoulders. “I think he was serious about wanting salvation. Not coming back would seriously jeopardize his goal.”

  “How in the hell can you be so sure?” Sally asked.

  “I spent some time with him today in the vehicle, got to know him a little,” Burt said.

  “I didn’t hear you discussing anything. You yelled at him about how he was screwing up,” Derrick interjected. “And I was with you the whole time.”

  Burt acted as if he hadn’t heard him. “Anyway, I feel like my head is going to explode. Can we go inside and sit down?” he asked.

  They had refueled the generator before loading the canisters. With its current payload, it should last till mid-morning tomorrow. Then, they would have to use their last canister of gas, assuming Musial didn’t return by then. If he didn’t return, they would be powerless the following evening and the dark would have its way with them.

  Cecil and Derrick helped Burt to his palette. They each donated one of their own pillows to help keep his head elevated as much as possible.

  “How do you feel, now?” Cecil asked as he sat down in a nearby chair, his elbows on his knees.

  Burt touched his hand to the bandages on his forehead, and then gave a half-grimace and half-smile.

  “I feel like a tractor ran over my head. Otherwise, I’m in mint condition.”

  Cecil took out a flashlight and leaned closer.

  “Look at me,” he said. Burt obliged with a pained expression. His eyes squinted as if he was staring into the sun rather than a flashlight.

  “You have a concussion,” Cecil said. “I hope that’s the least of your worries.”

  “Don’t give me this doomsday vibe, jerk. Shoot me straight.”

  “I’m not a doctor and even if I were we couldn’t tell anything without a cat scan or an x-ray. For right now, you should rest and keep your head elevated. I think Charlotte has more aspirin or acetaminophen,” he paused and took a deep breath. “We should ice it too.”

  “I’ll get some,” Sally volunteered as she scampered into the kitchen.

  A few moments later she returned with a handful of ice cubes sealed in a large sealable freezer bag.

  “So that’s it?” Burt asked. “Just rest and freeze my noggin?”

  Cecil gave him a reassuring nod, but deep down he knew it was not the whole truth. He had given him the best-case scenario. Worst-case scenario is Burt might have brain swelling or hemorrhaging, which doesn’t get better. If so, his headaches would grow to an agonizing level before he slipped into a coma, never to wake up again.

  Cecil watched his friend as worry began to eat away at him. Burt was slowly fading.

  “Do you know where you are?” Cecil asked as Sally changed positions with the freezer bag, moving it to his right temple.

  Burt first regarded him with annoyance, as if it was the most stupid question he ever heard. His countenance soon faded to confusion, followed by panic. He looked around the room for some clue, some reminder. After several desperate moments, his gaze fell on Charlotte. His expression changed course as if he shifted into reverse.

  “Her place,” he said with a meek smile nodding at Charlotte.

  Cecil glanced at Sally and saw her wearing a triumphant smile. He had gotten the question right, which must mean he would be okay. When she saw Cecil’s worried eyes, her smile vanished.

  “Try and keep him awake for as long as you can,” Cecil said as he got up and walked out the front door.

  He descended the stairs and stared up at the menacing red sky with its orange clouds.

  “Where are you, Abbs?” he asked out loud.

  Was she standing there beside him, just as the Impals had done for thousands of years before the storm arrived? He reached out his hand as if he were beckoning some unseen person to take it. He waited for well over a minute, but when the cold and warm sensation did not come, he began to cry. He had never felt more alone. For all intents and purposes, his whole family was gone. He squinted, trying to fight back the stinging burn of his tears, and saw the makeshift grave of Dr. Winder a few feet away.

  Would he soon be burying another friend? Would they all be buried out here … save one last person. Or, would they die all together when the dark finally spilled in? Cecil walked as far away from the cabin as possible without going into the shadows. For a fleeting second, he considered running into the woods and ending it all, ending the misery. It would all be over and he would not have to worry about anything again. Maybe he would see Abbs. He could tell her he was sorry and beg her forgiveness. Then he thought of the rows and rows of sleeping Impals lined up at the base, ready to be dumped into the Tesla Gate. They were the suicides, the ones who gave up on life and took the easy way out. If he ran into the woods voluntarily, wouldn’t it make him a suicide? He wouldn’t do anyone any good.

  “You damn coward,” he muttered as he wiped a tear from his eye.

  If he wasn’t so distraught, so stressed, so disgusted … so terrified, he might have noticed a faint cold touch in the center of his back.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE WAIT

  “Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.”

  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Jack sat in his cell the rest of the day and all through the night with no contact from anyone. Of course, he had his companions in the dark to keep him company. They visited each time the guards flicked the lights off and on at five-minute intervals. When the experiments first started he tried to fake an insatiable desire to harm himself. This only lasted so long. After a minute or two, it was evident Jack was not affected by the dark. If he were, he would have been dead many times over.

  Whoever administered this experimental light show seemed to take great joy in it. They sometimes blinked the lights in the rhythm of popular show tunes. By the time morning rolled around, Jack was exhausted. If he could, he would have murdered his mystery tormenter in front of the wh
ole base.

  “If I see the rhythm of Copa Cabaña tapped out again like some sort of hellish Morse code, I’m going to put a dull knife through the wankstain’s throat,” he thought to himself.

  He was pretty sure the whole base knew his ‘dark’ little secret by now. The question was, did they know half of it or all of it? Did they send troops out to his house this morning to turn it inside out? He knew they would be desperate to find some important piece of information explaining his ability. He was sure a half dozen soldiers were going through his flat as he sat here. The more important question was, what would they find? Was he as careful and discreet as he believed? He thought so, but on TV didn’t they always find some piece of evidence the killer overlooked? He still didn’t believe he had done anything wrong. Perhaps his inner peace and his insatiable arrogance made him careless. This thought turned his emotionless guts upside down. He broke into a sweat, feeling as if he was going to be ill at any moment. He bent over and clutched his stomach as he rocked back and forth. He felt dizzy and knew he must channel his thoughts elsewhere, to focus on something else. Just as he thought it was going to be impossible, his thoughts came together. With laser focus, they coalesced into a single image in his head.

  “Bitch,” he said loud enough it echoed around his small steel cell.

  He thought of Donna and her treachery. His twisted guts filled with a burning, homicidal rage. He was going to kill her the next time he saw her. Oh yes, he would put a dull knife through her throat, but only after he tortured her for a satisfactory amount of time. How long would that be? Well, the way he felt right now, it would be a pretty damned long time.

  What Jack did not know was that the British Army was very much interested in him. Not because he was a murdering psychopath in their midst. They had sent a small platoon to his house and found nothing except for a few blood spots on the floor where he hit his head on the stool. They took blood samples and, when analyzed, they would confirm it was his blood. The cage, Jack’s favorite killing stage, had been disassembled and put away after last night’s bloody mess. He hid it well. He used plastic sheets under the cage which caught the excess blood. Jack had disposed of them when he disposed of the old lady’s body. Forensically speaking, he was clean. However, their interest was in Jack’s ability. Little did Jack know, he wasn’t quite as unique as he thought.

  The acting President of the United States shared this trait along with his current cabinet. There were also reports of similar people around the world. The base had two of them in confinement a few yards away from Jack’s cell. These two were receiving the same rhythmic torment as Jack, but their tormenter was more partial to Slim Whitman tunes. The discovery of these individuals was via their own stupidity and arrogance. The scientists could not find a single factor that would make these two different from anyone else. Of course, if they dug deeper into their personal lives, they would find a common link as obvious as the nose on their faces.

  Their dark behavior made them kindred spirits with the whispering lunatics in the shadows. They had committed their own terrible acts. The dark was now a litmus test of the arrogant psychopaths and sociopaths of the world, but the world had too many other things to worry now.

  Yet, not all these people were the same either. Take the dark soul of a man who called himself Ruth; or Musial for examples. There were many others around the world committing corporeal hijacking. All done for the possibility of salvation from their eternal dark void. They did not have hope before the eye of the cosmic storm opened the door to their realm. These souls were desperate to escape their hopelessness. In the absence of hope their only purpose was to perpetrate their ignorance and arrogance.

  Jack heard voices and shuffling of feet outside his door. Shadows passed by his tiny portal window and he stood up. The veins stuck out on his neck and he dug his fingers into the steel door, breaking a couple of nails. A trickle of blood flowed down his fingers, but he did not notice. He focused on what he saw in the hallway. Donna passed by with two armed guards.

  “You!” Jack screamed. “I’ll kill you!”

  The door was thick, but it was not sound proof. The soldiers faced forward, unflinching. However, Donna glanced over her shoulder as they passed. Instead of regarding him with contempt or gloating; she regarded him with pity. Even in his conscious free heart, he felt a sudden glimmer of the sorrow in Donna’s eyes. It was as if all the wind went out of him at one time.

  “You bitch,” he whispered. He jerked his hands back from the door as if it scorched him. He tucked his fingers under his armpits as he plopped down on his cot.

  He was blank and numb not from a lack of emotion, but from an overwhelming wave of emotion. It washed through him like the intimate touch of an Impal … soothingly warm and frigidly cold. He felt sorrow, he felt regret, and he felt guilt. He was not sure why. Jack leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to process these feelings. They were as foreign to him as physics was to an amoeba.

  He closed his eyes as the emotional cyclone continued to rage within.

  Ruth slept. He knew if he did not allow the woman’s fragile body to rest, it would not last much longer. The one good thing about occupying a body was that even as the body slept, the occupying soul could still keep one eye open, so to speak. He had managed to keep an eye on Rebekah and Malakhi. However, even though they slept closely, it was similar to trying to watch someone across a wide field with binoculars. This gave him the strange sensation of being close, yet feeling far away from somebody. He had not felt this since the day he died.

  This caused him to do something out of the ordinary, he thought of his friend, Dismas. He had watched him die several yards away as they both hung outside Jerusalem. He never saw Dismas in the void. For centuries, he wondered why. Some people are just slow learners and it took the man calling himself Ruth almost two thousand years to figure it out. Dismas was penitent for his evil acts when he died; he was not. In fact, he was downright belligerent in his ignorance and arrogance. He murdered, raped, and stole his whole life and had not felt a shred of guilt or remorse. He believed he was doing what he must to survive. To him, in his ignorance and arrogance, all his actions were justified necessities.

  Ruth did want salvation, but the temptation to revert to his old ways was overwhelming at times. He wanted to take Rebekah out in the woods, rape her, and then slit her throat. What good would it accomplish? It might make him feel good for a few minutes or even a few hours. But, then where would he be? He knew his desire to have sex with this woman and murder her for his own well-being did not fly. He almost laughed to himself when he considered he was not equipped to rape a woman right now.

  He watched and waited as the old lady and her body slept under his control. He was convinced his salvation somehow rested with them. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was somehow atoning for his deeds by watching out for them.

  As he thought about these things, a name ran through his head, his real name. His mother was Ruth, this much was true. In the void, he was just a nameless occupant of a nameless nothingness. He had to stop and think for a moment. It was such a long time since he remembered. When he did recall, his face broke into a wide grin in spite of the sleeping body.

  “That’s my name and I will have salvation,” he thought to himself. “As sure as my name is Gestas.”

  Musial did not return by nightfall, which worried everyone. However, when he didn’t return by the next morning, panic began to set in. There was not enough fuel to last another night, especially if it was a cloudy day. They might not even make it to nightfall. This possibility was driven home by the distant rumble of thunder.

  “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” Derrick said as he stared out the window at the darkening sky. The perimeter of daylight was closing fast on their little cabin. “We are going to have to milk the generator for all it’s got today. If this storm doesn’t pass soon, we won’t have enough gas to make it through the day, let alone tonight,” he said, tapping his knuckles on the window w
ith frustration.

  “Shut up, Derrick!” Burt snapped. “He’ll make it back.”

  Derrick folded his arms and turned to face him. “You sure got chummy with that murderer,” he said. “What’s the deal? Don’t tell me you actually sympathize with him?”

  Burt did not answer. He just stared at him with distant, glassy eyes as if he were trying to figure out who was speaking. Cecil watched pensively from the sofa as he sat next to Barbara. She had been exhibiting some encouraging signs this morning. Her mouth moved as if trying to form words. It wasn’t much, but it raised his hopes a little. As he watched his two friends, his tiny amount of joy began to melt away. Burt was showing all the classic signs of someone who had suffered a severe concussion. The first occurrence of nausea and vomiting had begun at sunrise. Cecil hoped, they all hoped, Burt just got his bell rung a little. The longer they watched, the more they realized this was not the case. If he did suffer a severe head trauma, he needed medical attention, and he needed it now. Of course, it was not an option without taking him to a military base.

  Cecil felt as if a stone was sitting in his gut as he watched his friend’s eyes open and close as he tried to focus on Derrick. Did he have reservations about Musial’s trustworthiness? Absolutely, but he knew Burt was right; they had no choice but to trust him. He also knew Burt was no fool.

  “Well, if he doesn’t come back it’s all on you!” Derrick continued.

  Cecil had heard enough. He saw the tears begin to roll down Sally’s face as she rubbed her husband’s arm. He stood up and stood between Derrick and Burt.

  “Give it a rest Derrick,” he muttered.

  He looked in Derrick’s eyes, expecting to see rage. Instead, he saw something he did not expect, he saw fear. His anger at Derrick started to fade into empathy. Cecil was terrified as well.

  “Let’s go outside,” Cecil suggested.

  Derrick blinked and then glanced around the room at all the eyes locked on him. He suddenly felt embarrassed. He turned and walked out onto the porch.