But as I followed Cassie to her job in the remote house deep within Alden Woods, I began to sense that there was even more interesting monster to be found here, one spawned not only in the mind of a man-child, but released from its cage by Cassie herself.
Did she deserve what she got in the end? Because, when you think about it, Cassie wasn’t so innocent a victim after all, was she? I mean, what kind of babysitter keeps sleeping pills in a babysitting “kit”?
‡
THE SCENARIO EGG
A man’s death liberates his soul.
It’s my birthday. Jennifer tells me that it’s been no time at all since the last one—a blink of an eye, if even that—but how can she say such a thing? The stress of the past twelve months is clearly written on her face, the tiny creases that weren’t there when I first met her. Laugh lines. Cracks in her façade. “It’s nothing,” she says, as if desire alone can erase them.
Wishful thinking.
“When we get back,” she goes on, “it’ll seem like yesterday.”
Yesterday. Then why can’t I remember it like it was yesterday? Because it wasn’t. It was a year ago, and there’s nothing she can say to convince me otherwise.
The truth of the matter is, even if it had been yesterday, I still wouldn’t remember much at all. So much of what happened that night is a blur, an alcoholic fog. And so much has happened since. For one thing, I’m a totally different person now.
Unfortunately, despite the differences I see in her, she’s exactly the same.
Some of the memories have come back on their own—a drib here, a drab there. Some of them Jennifer has spoon-fed to me in the days since I ran into her outside the little bistro over by Battery Park, the one with the mummified sandwiches in the deli case. She claims she knows what happened—how it happened—but her explanation doesn’t sit right with me. She insists she knows the truth and that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, that everything I’ve come up with on my own is wrong.
“It’s new-tech,” she says, and she claims she knows how to make things right again.
I don’t believe her. I don’t want to believe her. All she wants is for things to go back to the way they were. I don’t. Going back would be a mistake.
Still, it scares me. What if what she says is true? Then nothing’s changed. Not really. And nothing will have changed.
After we get back.
If we get back.
Just like it was yesterday.
Which is why I can’t take the chance. I have to do something about it.
“Get it,” she says, pointing. “Get the egg.” She’s been pestering me about it for the past three days, hounding me endlessly, wanting to hold it. She’s really getting on my nerves. How could I have thought she was attractive? I look at her now and I’m disgusted by what I see. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Was I really like that, too?
“It’s time to crack it, Hanson.”
I knew the moment I saw her sitting there laughing that she was crazy. Now I know she always was, I just didn’t see it. See what a year can do to a person?
Or maybe I’m the one who’s crazy.
Anyway, it doesn’t change anything.
I pull the object out of my pocket, hold it up. Her eyes flash with excitement and longing when she sees it. She begins to laugh and my skin shrivels at the sound of it, too loud, too harsh on my ears. I long for the sound of absence.
“I knew you had it the whole time!” she cackles. She reaches out for it, but I pull it away.
Her face grows dark, hard. “Hanson?” she growls. Her voice gains a murderous edge to it. “Hanson.”
Crazy. They’re all crazy.
I want to tell her that I don’t want to leave. I like it here. I like it just fine. This world is a much nicer place without everyone rushing headlong through it into madness. Do we really want to bring them all back?
She does. “Crack the egg, Hanson,” she says, growling.
I look at it in my hands. It’s feels warm and alive. All of humanity nestled inside of it. I could put it in my pocket, if I so wished. I could walk away. I could lose it, and then what?
“Now Hanson. Do it, or so help me I’ll—!” She advances.
I raise it above my head, and she stops, shuts up. Her eyes light up with lunatic glee. She really thinks I am going to do it. Well, I am.
I swing my hand downward at the hard granite countertop of the bar. I finally understand what I need to do.
“See you on the other side,” she cries, just as I switch the direction of my aim. I think: Sonny was right, and the egg smashes into the middle of her face, shattering her nose and spewing blood everywhere.
There’s a loud crunch! A flash and intense pain.
Then…darkness.
† † †
I remember waking up. I remember trying to get myself into a sitting position and immediately regretting it. A nuclear war was waging inside my head and my tongue felt like someone had used it to clean a litter box.
I had no immediate recollection of where I was or why I was here—the here being behind a privacy screen in what looked to be a restaurant in a very tall skyscraper in the financial district. I knew this because I could see the familiar profile of 70 Pine Street from where I was sitting. From the view, I figured I had to be in Carcher Tower. And from the angle of the light, it was morning.
The lack of context—why I was here, why I was alone—wasn’t worrying me. Not yet, anyway. Short term memory loss was no stranger to me. I’d blacked out so many times after a hard night of drinking that I’d stopped trying to remember all the moments I’d forgotten. By the looks of things, I knew it had happened again.
There had been a party. That much was obvious. The floor around me was littered with glasses and plates and everything smelled of booze. Expensive booze. It was unnaturally quiet.
“Hello?” I croaked. It was all I could manage to get out without my head threatening to pop off my neck.
No one answered. Apparently the cleaning crew hadn’t come in yet to straighten the place up after the party.
I wondered what the celebration had been for.
I could hear the faint tinkling of water pouring into a basin, and the soft hiss and pop of live speakers turned up real loud. Apparently somebody had left the sound system on when the party ended.
I stumbled out from behind the screen. Across the room, I could see the sun peeking over Peck Slip and the iconic girders of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a clear day and the sky near the horizon was tinged a brilliant orange, turning from white to deep blue above it and then fading to a darker blue-gray directly overhead. I figured it was probably five-thirty or so. Five-forty-five at the latest.
As I surveyed the wreckage around me, my mind dug deep into some inner recess, and pulled out a name: Cliff Dweller. That’s where I was, in Cliff Dwellers on the top floor of Carcher Tower, a six-star restaurant in a five-star world, where the über-rich and powerful held their power orgies. I’d always wanted to come here, but never had the chance. Too bad I couldn’t remember any of it. I’m sure I would’ve appreciated it.
I went over and sat down in the shadows by the opposite window and leaned against the glass, relishing the coolness on my face as I tried to recall something—anything—from the last twenty-four hours of my life. From past experience, I knew that if I waited long enough, it would eventually come to me. I just had to relax my mind. Forcing it would only make my headache worse.
I remembered a crash, some laughter, then a flash of light, hard and incredibly bright. I remember a feeling of searing pain inside my head. For a split second, I wondered if maybe I’d had a stroke, had died and gone to Heaven—or just died, anyway—since I doubted Heaven looked anything like the financial district. The other place maybe, but not Heaven. Maybe I was in Hell.
While I was sitting there, my phone beeped at me. I reached down to get it out of my pocket and realized I was already holding something in my hand. I looked down at it and tried to whe
edle the particular kernel of information concerning it from the churning mosh pit of my mind, but it just wasn’t coming.
The object was pearly white, ovoid. Translucent white. Clearly not glass, but neither was it plastic. There were no seams, no words printed on it. And it glowed. Despite the sense of having seen it before, I had no idea what it could be, so I tucked it away in my pocket and retrieved my phone.
It was a text from my mother, sent the previous afternoon: [Happy 39th. Luv Mom].Despite the agony I was in, I had to give her a smile. Even at my age, whenever she did something like that, it made me feel like a kid again. Sometimes, doing what I do for a living, it was nice to be reminded of the simple things like that.
So it was my birthday. Thirty-nine. Maybe that explained the party. It at least explained the blackout.
“But it doesn’t explain why everyone would just leave me here,” I grunted, shifting uncomfortably to relieve a cramp in my side and trying to remember who might’ve accompanied me here.
You made a wish, my mind whispered, as if it explained everything.
What? I wished everyone would just abandon me here? That made no sense.
Street was here.
That’s right. It was a company party. I remembered that now. It had nothing to do with my birthday. I could remember telling everyone in the office it was because I was turning the big three-nine and that it was all downhill after this, but, of course, that was just bullshit and everyone knew it. They accused me of trying to get people to sympathize with me, to buy me drinks.
Like I couldn’t pay for my own.
Which made me wonder if there were other Bradley Street & Hillerton employees here who’d also failed to make it home last night. Or was I the only one?
“Hello?” I called, louder this time, but no one answered. The pounding in my head warned me not to do that again. My eyeballs threatened mutiny if I did.
I was an investment broker in new-tech discovery at BS&H. I’d been with the company for almost eight years and was making damn good money—mid-seven figures. BS&H was an investment firm focusing on microcaps, specifically targeting the emerging tech sector. Renewable energy, storage, communication, networking. The Bleeding Edge, as we liked to call it. And it was an appropriate aphorism; a lot of investor blood was being spilled. A lot of it from people who, when you got right down to it, really had none to spare. Not that it ever made any difference to the guys at the top. Or, for that matter, to any of the rest of us. It was play money, and this was all a game.
We were all about new-tech, looking at anything that was different. It didn’t matter how different, as long as it delivered something unique, we brought it in. Everything was vetted in-house; a lot of it turned out to be garbage. Some of it was gold.
Computer processing was the buzz word, but conventional processors were obsolete; they’d run their course. We’d seen them pretty much max out on the macro-scale and they sure as hell had nowhere to go in miniaturization. Moore’s Law hadn’t just hit the wall, it had slammed head first into it, and its brains were oozing out all over the motherboard.
Devices were out. Even subatomic circuitry and photonic processors had become commodity items by then. China was exporting about a trillion units a year, manufacturing twice that many. But the world kept demanding faster, better. More. We were depleting resources faster than we could mine them just to manufacture what was no longer keeping up.
Which is why, at least in my mind, the direction we needed to take was new materials.
I had a handle on something coming out of a tech incubator on the West Coast. I’d poured a butt-load of cash into the project, determined to go big or fail trying. So what if it meant some people were going to lose their retirement funds? Me, I’d still have my nice little nest egg. I’d still drive around in my Lamborghini and sleep in my Madison Avenue penthouse.
I deleted the text from my mom, and up popped this photo I must’ve taken last night. It was of Street, our fearless leader, and he was talking to some Arabian guy I didn’t recognize. I remember he smelled like cinnamon and cloves—the Arab, not Street—and, strangely, like cheap hand soap. I remember wondering why he was here and why he had the big guy’s ear.
As for Street, I’d never been within ten feet of him so I had no idea how he smelled. Like money, I guess. And control. The guy made millions just exhaling. Whole countries shifted every time he farted in his sleep.
It was strange that he’d be there. He never attended these things unless something big was going to happen. I mean something really big. I tried to think what it might be, but it just wasn’t coming to me right then.
It was the booze. There was a lot of it. I remember that now. Not much of an epiphany, of course, given my current post-inebriated state.
But now I remember there was also a lot of everything else: drugs, food, entertainment, wheeling and dealing. A lot of rich, beautiful, single people looking to hook up with other rich, beautiful, single people. A lot of rich, beautiful, married people looking to do the same.
And Sandra.
Of course. Sandra Sharipova, from Legal. I’d come to the party with her.
I looked around the empty restaurant, as if expecting her to materialize.
We weren’t together. The term tended to get bandied about a lot and meant different things to different people, but we were both pretty clear on what it meant for us. She and I were just friends. Besides, she was young enough to be my daughter. Not that the age difference necessarily played into those sorts of considerations.
I remember she went off to talk to some people that we both knew from the Tokyo office. I don’t remember seeing her again after that. It made me wonder which one of them she’d taken home.
I’d been drinking Diaka. I’d never had it before, but at twelve grand a shot, I figured I’d give it a try. They say that vodka clarified through diamonds tastes better, purer. I’m not so sure about that. But with the kind of people that were likely here last night, I knew they’d just as soon sip monkey piss filtered through kitty litter just for the privilege, simply because it cost that much. Hell, that’s why I was drinking it.
Turns out alcohol’s the same no matter how much you pay for it. It gets you just as wasted.
I remember standing over by the crap table with Raymond Barker and Sonny Ghosh. We were watching Freeny McElroy, VP of Acquisitions, placing hundred thousand dollar bets on consecutive rolls and not really caring if he was losing or not. It was just past eleven o’clock. The party was really getting going by then. We were talking about…
Actually, I don’t remember what we were talking about. It doesn’t matter. We were doing a lot of drinking and talking—probably about sex, or money, or sex and money, or about how sexy money was—and that’s when I saw her.
“Who’s that?” I’d asked, directing the question to Sonny, since Ray-Ray—that’s what we called Raymond, Ray-Ray—was gay and wouldn’t pick up on the underlying subtext quite as fast.
Jennifer, my mind whispered at me. Yet another connection in my brain had found a way to repair itself.
Jennifer. I don’t think I’d ever met her before last night. I certainly would’ve remembered if I had.
“Which one?” Sonny asked, turning to look.
I pointed with my drink. “Strawberry blond. Black strapless dress. Blue diamonds dripping from her earlobes. She’s standing over by the fountain.”
The light from the water was reflecting off her face, making it glow. She was gorgeous.
Sonny whistled with appreciation, but was shaking his head, giving me mixed signals. “You sure know how to pick ‘em, Trask.”
An older lady in a fur coat moved out of my line of vision and I saw that the redhead was talking to Cal Minover. I cringed.
Cal was two years younger than me, my boss, and an occasional sub in my Thursday foursome at Ridgedale Country Club. He had a two handicap when he was sober and a habit of hooking his drives after his fourth drink, a fact I probably shouldn’t have taken
advantage of as much as I did. I knew he secretly resented it when I beat him and was always looking for ways to get even. He liked telling smutty jokes.
Funny, the things you can reduce a person down to when all is said and done: drinking, joking and hooking.
I guess he was telling another of his jokes, because the woman in the black dress suddenly burst out laughing. It was such a spontaneous thing, not like the genteel laughter of the women I was used to hanging out with. But she didn’t seem embarrassed by it. She didn’t cover her mouth with her hand. It was totally natural, fresh. Totally vulnerable. It drew me in even more. I was fascinated by her. I couldn’t stop watching.
I remember hearing Sonny say, “Fresh blood,” before last night’s scene playing out in my head suddenly took a backseat to this morning’s abused stomach. I needed to throw up, but I didn’t want to move from my spot against the window, so I just sat there and let the nausea roll over me in tidal waves, leaving me moaning and gawping for air until it finally diminished enough that I knew I wasn’t going to be sick. I wasn’t sure I was going to live, but at least I wasn’t in imminent danger of turning myself inside out.
I recalled more of last night. I wondered whether I’d gone over to talk with her, the woman in the black dress. I must have at some point if I knew her name. I remember wanting to go over, but my mind kept coming to a dead-end.
I gave up. No sense in trying to force it.
There were other texts on my phone, mostly from people reminding me how old I was. Nice. I went through and deleted them one by one. The last text was from Cal. He’d sent it around eleven-thirty the night before.
[Intrsting nyt? Report 2 me 1st thing in am]
Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror Page 5