Dark Lightning

by Mary L. Farmer

  “What?!” she demanded, whipping around.

  It was the hypnotist, Aleem. Haven pulled her messenger bag higher on her shoulder. “Yes?” she said a bit more courteously.

  “I was just wondering…” Aleem’s dark eyes radiated warmth as he smiled, but Haven knew it as a well-practiced gesture. “Would you consider coming back for tomorrow night’s show? Meeting someone with your level of psychometric ability is quite rare, and I’d be very interested to find out if we could duplicate your performance. What do you say?”

  He’s got to be joking…her ‘performance’? Haven shifted uncomfortably as groups of students streamed around them and bumped into her shoulders. “Look, I’ve never done that before. Read an object on command, I mean. I don’t even know if I could do it a second time. And honestly…I don’t think I’d want to.”

  “I understand your concern.” Aleem gazed at her sympathetically. “But, if you like, we could use something more innocuous the next time. Possibly an object with a shorter history—a teddy bear, an ordinary pencil…something of that nature?”

  “Sorry, but I’m not interested in going through...in doing that again. Besides, I’m going to be out of town tomorrow.”

  “I see.” Shrugging, Aleem extended his hand. “Well, no harm in asking, is there? It was good to meet you, Haven. I’m sorry if your hypnosis experience was unpleasant for you.”

  Haven flashed him an angry look, then reluctantly shook his hand. Yeah, I’ll bet you’re sorry. I just made your show the talk of the whole campus. She turned to go, saying nothing.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Aleem said, producing the silver watch from his pocket. He held it out. “Apparently, this gentleman left before I could return his item. Did you happen to see where he went?”

  Haven looked down at the heavily embossed case and reflexively backed up a step. On the front was a coat of arms containing stalks of wheat and a scythe, surrounded by a scaly serpent-like creature, its fangs barred.

  “No,” Haven replied quickly. She shuddered and recalled the vision of the vile, dark-haired man. Not only had she been forced to watch the man’s actions—she’d also been privy to his revolting thoughts. “No, I didn’t. Maybe he’ll come back for it later.”

  “Perhaps,” Aleem said politely. “Well, then…good night, Haven. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

  Haven backed away from the hypnotist and the loathsome silver watch. “G-Good night,” she muttered, then turned and bolted from the building before tears could leave her eyes.

  TWO

  WHEEZING, CLAUDE VENIMER climbed into his Buick sedan and started the engine. The short jog across the Philadelphia University campus had left the eighty-year-old man gasping for breath. His joints ached, and his heart banged against his ribs.

  That was close. A little too close.

  He reversed out of his parking space and threw the car into drive. He’d been careless, called far too much attention to himself tonight. Surely every student in that room at the Kanbar Campus Center had noticed him. Next time he came around, he’d likely be recognized despite his disguise.

  Still, the results had been worth the risk.

  When Venimer saw the girl on the hypnotist’s stage, he just couldn’t help himself. He would have been a fool to pass up the opportunity to test out her powers. And she didn’t disappoint.

  The car’s tires squealed as he whipped out of the visitor parking lot and sped away toward Henry Avenue and the expressway.

  It wouldn’t be long now. “You are mine, mon chaton,” muttered Venimer. “Our time has finally come.”

  He ran his tongue over his bottom lip, tasting mint. By means of the silver watch, the hypnotist at Kanbar had afforded the girl a glimpse of the youthful and virile man Venimer had been at twenty—when his name was Jean-Claude Faucheur, and he was the toast of the most brilliant salons in Paris. The old gimp he saw in the mirror these days was a far cry from the handsome Frenchman he once was, and still considered himself to be.

  He cursed the withered body that was slowly betraying him. When I find the object, I shall be restored to my true self.

  Venimer reached up and gingerly peeled a false gray mustache from his upper lip, then took off his tweed newsboy cap and stolen faculty badge and tossed them on the passenger seat. Once again, he counted himself lucky that the girl—she with hair of burnished gold and eyes like the green-blue garden pools at Giverny—attended a small, private university. This had made the task of monitoring her movements somewhat easy.

  He’d gone to Philadelphia University tonight to watch her as he usually did, to follow her from a distance as she made the trek from her dorm room over to the Ravenhill Dining Hall or to the library to study.

  But tonight his ‘kitten’—or chaton, as he was fond of referring to her in his native French—had headed over to the Kanbar Center with her dark-haired friend.

  He smiled, recalling how the girl’s friend tricked her into going up on stage for a demonstration. At first, he was amazed that she’d revealed her psychic talent in such a public way, for it went against all that he knew about her. In general, the girl’s behavior was fairly reserved and predictable. She wasn’t a big partier, didn’t drink much alcohol, and dated only occasionally.

  The only time she seemed to deviate from her routine was when she met with unexpected stress. In such situations, her tendency was to become flustered and a bit impulsive—and therefore, harder to track.

  Venimer deduced the reason the girl reluctantly agreed to go on stage. Rather than risk the embarrassment of fleeing through the crowd, she’d stayed, and gambled on the chance nothing would come of her stint in the hypnotist’s velvet chair.

  Happily, she’d lost that bet in a most spectacular way.

  Venimer had found the girl’s psychometric reading of his watch utterly fascinating. He was aroused by the thought of his chaton observing him in bed with the servant girl Johanna. She could not hide her obvious awe and pleasure…ecstasy was evident on her lovely face. He smiled, reveling in the familiar sensations stirring in his loins. His plan of seduction had just begun.

  He recalled how, to escape detection, he’d slipped out of his seat to watch her performance from the safety of the back of the room. From that vantage point, he’d relived every decadent moment right along with her, right down to the honeypot in Aunt Henrietta’s bedchamber. Venimer sucked on his tongue as he recalled the succulent taste of Johanna’s smooth skin. Such a long time had gone by—much, much too long—since he’d last drunk in the intoxicating scent of the female body.

  That was a deficiency he meant to remedy very soon.

  Venimer checked the rearview mirror. Ah, bon, no one was following him. After the show ended, he’d ducked into the men’s restroom and waited until the girl had left to retrieve his watch from the hypnotist. In his excitement he’d almost gone away without the timepiece, and that would have spelled disaster for his plans. The watch was his only surviving possession from home, and he knew that not having it, he wouldn’t be able to return there…with his lovely, young bride-to-be.

  Easy now, you must introduce this particular young woman to your ways slowly. Seduction usually got one further with a woman than coercion…but in Venimer’s experience, emotional anguish was even better. In fact, the surest way into a woman’s heart was along the path of torment. Deep down, he believed, most women loved to suffer, especially when they believed they had no choice.

  My nefarious countryman, the Marquis de Sade himself, was entirely right on that account. Mais alors...when all other methods failed, Venimer’s trusty dagger could be very persuasive.

  He thought of it now, stowed within easy reach inside the glove compartment, its razor-sharp blade polished and ever ready, its ivory and pearl handle worn smooth from decades of handling. Venimer stared out the windshield at the car ahead of him and frowned. The only person he could foresee spoiling his plan was the girl’s plump, dark-haired roommate, ‘Kristy.’

  What a damned nuis
ance.

  The girl’s other friends were oblivious—too wrapped up in their studies and obsessing over their love lives to notice an old man in a tweed sport coat walking past them several times a week. But Venimer needed to be careful whenever this Kristy was around—that freakish, loud-mouthed slut tended to notice everything.

  The trouble was, she occasionally showed up at the estate sales run by his kitten’s much older brother. Venimer pictured Kristy walking around in her old-fashioned, mismatched clothing and cringed. In his opinion she dressed like a two-dollar whore, and quite apparently Kristy’s fondness for this hideous ‘vintage’ apparel was rubbing off on his precious chaton.

  Just last week, he’d observed the girl at a shop on South Street in Philadelphia trying on some elbow-length, black lace gloves, similar to a pair he recalled seeing years ago on a harlot at Madame Berlingot's near Plâce Pigalle.

  He would have to address that issue later. He simply could not tolerate his future bride resembling une prostituée.

  In addition, this irritating Kristy toted around a ridiculous boyfriend who actually imagined himself to be a ‘fencer.’ The idea was so ludicrous that Venimer laughed out loud. I, on the other hand, am a superb swordsman. I could bring that whelp to his knees in thirty seconds. Maybe even twenty.

  Venimer had trained under one of the best fencing masters in all of Paris. Indeed, his extensive knowledge of that ancient fighting art (now, to his great vexation, largely relegated to a mere sport or quaint pastime) made the dimwit boyfriend’s posturing in his white suit all the more pathetic.

  Someone should put the girl’s roommate out of her misery, thought Venimer darkly, glancing at the glove compartment. And the boyfriend, too.

  He snickered, but he shook his head.

  Mais non. Satisfactory as dragging the cold steel of his dagger across the dark-haired girl’s overfed, milky white throat would be, Venimer hadn’t the time to orchestrate any incidental killings. Slayings took time to plan—time he didn’t have at present.

  Not when he was so close to attaining his prize.

  Besides, the girl’s podgy roommate was of no consequence. What he sought wouldn’t only allow him to return to Paris, but would permit him to accumulate untold riches. He wasn’t clear whether it had the power to restore him to his youthful vitality—but he hoped so. He was certain, however, that finding it would ensure his beloved chaton remained with him forever.

  But alas, the old ebony chest (or ‘magic box,’ as Johanna had, in her ignorance, referred to it) he’d first encountered on his uncle’s estate had yet to be uncovered.

  However, he had located the girl.

  It was she who would somehow make the discovery that led to Venimer’s deliverance, she who would enable his long-delayed escape from this wretched existence of stalking and endless expectation. The difficult part was, he had no idea how or when this momentous event would occur, only that it would happen very soon.

  As he left the expressway and headed north toward his low-rent condominium in Doylestown, Venimer recalled the long journey that had brought him to this point. He’d come to Pennsylvania in 1974—almost forty years ago. The girl in question hadn’t even been born yet when he’d started his search for the chest. Only after decades of soul-numbing disappointment did Venimer finally realize he’d never find the chest by himself.

  For a long time he was angry—if only he’d realized this sooner, he could have made more of his lengthy stay in America (which he found to be a graceless and godless country, full of vulgar people). The answer had been staring him in the face all along…he was just too stubborn to see it.

  Find the girl.

  The girl would lead him to the chest. The idea was simple—find the girl, then sit back and wait. That was all he need do. Given that he already knew her name and birthdate, he assumed finding her would be fairly straightforward.

  It had not been.

  For ten years, Venimer scoured every state on the Eastern Seaboard and beyond for any trace of the girl, to no avail. He even befriended a couple of disreputable private detectives—avaricious men who didn’t ask questions. Yet they came up empty-handed, too. Years passed without finding a trace of the old chest or the girl. At one point, he’d nearly flung himself off the Ben Franklin Bridge in despair.

  Then, two years ago, he’d finally gotten a break.

  Thanks to the blessed mountain of information available on the Internet and a newspaper story about a Reading, Pennsylvania housewife who’d suffered a baffling nervous breakdown, the girl had suddenly appeared in the search engines.

  It seemed her given name had been quite a mouthful, so she’d changed it. He guessed the girl might have also made the switch to escape any notoriety caused by her lunatic mother—the unfortunate subject of the article.

  This middle-aged woman had, without warning, come completely unglued from reality one bright April morning. She drove herself to a railroad crossing, got out of her car, and calmly waited until a freight train approached. Sobbing, the woman then proceeded to stand in the middle of the track and shut her eyes. A municipal employee who happened to be working in a nearby manhole ran over and dragged the woman to safety. Hysterical and incoherent, Adeline LaBonte-Meadows was turned over to the police and promptly hospitalized.

  Despite months of therapy, the doctors were mystified as to the cause of the woman’s sudden breakdown, or her reason for attempting suicide.

  The Reading police questioned the woman several times in an attempt to ascertain whether she’d been assaulted, or perhaps sustained some other trauma, but the madwoman refused to speak to anyone—not to the police, the doctors, or even her own family.

  Her husband, teen-aged daughter, and grown son were forced to watch helplessly as day after day she sat whimpering in a corner of the hospital, staring at the walls and muttering.

  The article ended by stating that, sadly, things like this sometimes happened. The human mind was a complex organ, and we still didn’t know about how the brain functioned—and so on. The writer also commented what “a shame” it was that this once-vibrant person had been abruptly reduced to a “broken-down shell of a woman, unfit to be either a wife or a mother.”

  Venimer grunted. Unfortunate, hare-brained idiot—no wonder her daughter was ashamed to bear her name.

  And so, thanks to the girl’s crazy maman and the public court records of the state of Pennsylvania, Venimer finally located his petit chaton. Two years ago, the charming young woman the world had known for sixteen years as Emily Havenwaith LaBonte-Meadows became simply…

  Haven Meadows.

  THREE

  Ronson Residence Hall

  Philadelphia University, East Falls, Pennsylvania

  Friday, October 5th, 9:15 p.m.

  HAVEN BURST INTO her dorm room and slammed the door behind her. Dumping her messenger bag on the desk, she began to pace. How could Kristy do this to me?! How could she be so thoughtless?!

  She raked her hands through her hair, already knowing the actual answer. This wasn’t her fault. Not really. I’m the one to blame. Haven knew her roommate’s impulsive tendencies well—the way Kristy tended to live in the moment and deal with any consequences later on. This is just another example of my carelessness.

  Why did I tell her in the first place? Why? I could have just kept it to myself, the way I’ve always done. But she had told Kristy about her hidden ‘talent,’ and now that information had been exposed in front of two hundred people.

  Haven flung herself onto the bed. Hugging her pillow to her chest, she squeezed her eyes shut. It wouldn’t be long now; soon the entire student body at Philadelphia University (and beyond) would know all about her freaky little secret.

  Haven rolled over and pressed her palms to her eyes. I will not cry. I won’t. She should never have let Kristy talk her into going to that stupid hypnotist show in the first place. What had she been thinking, anyway? You wanted to avoid studying, that’s what, she told herself glumly. And you wanted to hav
e some fun.

  What was supposed to be an hour or two of harmless entertainment had turned into a bizarre cabaret performance, with Haven as the unwitting star. To add to her humiliation, her cell phone had been chiming nonstop ever since she’d stormed out of Kanbar. Haven groaned and snatched the phone out of her back pocket to glower at the screen:

  HAVEN, JUST HEARD ABOUT THE SHOW, WTF??

  SO WEIRD GURRRL LIKE THE WHOLE CAMPUS IS TALKING ABOUT YOU

  U OKAY? CALL ME PLS JACKIE

  ***MASON HERE *** HEY IS IT TRUE R U REALLY PSYCHIC OR WHAT***

  H - CURTIS & ETHAN WERE @ KANBAR & SAID IT WAS CRAZEE!!

  OMG H, DID U REALLY SEE A MURDER??? CALL ME - BECCA

  Haven switched the phone’s ringer to silent mode and threw it down on the comforter. The genie’s out of the bottle—there’s no going back now. She would have to figure a way to deal with the unwanted attention. Eventually, the commotion would calm down, but right now, all she wanted to do was crawl under a rock until winter break.

  Haven heard a key in the lock. The dorm room door flew open as Kristy and her boyfriend Julian rushed in, breathless.

  “Haven! Thank God! We’ve been searching all over campus for you,” Kristy said. “Hey, are you all right?”

  “I don’t want to talk right now,” Haven said. She rolled on her stomach and buried her face in a pillow. “Just leave me alone, Kristy, okay?”

  “You don’t want to talk, or you don’t want to talk to me?” Kristy asked.

  Haven lifted her face. “All of the above.”

  “Hey, I said I’m sorry.” To Haven’s chagrin, Kristy plopped down next to her on the bed. “I thought that hypnotist guy would ask you a few questions, you know, maybe have you stand on one foot and pat your head the way he did with those other people.”

  “Please,” Haven growled.

  “Seriously, how the hell was I supposed to know he’d make you do a cold reading on the spot like that?”

  “Because he’s an entertainer, Kris!” Haven pushed up on her elbows. “They always go with whatever will make the biggest impact on the audience, whatever will have the biggest shock factor. It’s what those guys do.” She squeezed shut her reddened, hazel eyes. “Only, with me, he got a lot more than he bargained for. With me…he hit the mutant jackpot.”