“In the end their take was that the two things were in no way connected, because Clayton Willis was a God-fearing Christian family man who wouldn’t hurt a fly, a man with a family who kept to himself and never had one bit of trouble with the law or anyone else. His death was strange, but even the coroner said there was absolutely no sign of foul play or any reason to believe there’d been any.”
Darian slid his briefcase off his knees and let it drop softly to the floor. “So they ended up with this poor old bastard having some bizarre brain explosion that killed him and an odd coincidence with some old backpack from a girl no one’s seen in almost twenty-five years. Weird, but not connected as far as they’re concerned. Case closed.”
“What about Christy’s family?” Seth asked.
“Couple papers looked into just who Christiana Miller was…or is…I don’t know which.” Darian shrugged helplessly. “She did come from Florida originally like she said, and her father did pass away when she was young. She lived alone with her mother, a real piece of work, drug addict, boozer, mental problems and all sorts of arrests over the years.”
“Must’ve been horrible for her,” Raymond said softly. It was the first thing he’d said in some time. “Living like that as a kid, I mean.”
Seth barely acknowledged him, his attention still zeroed in on Darian. “And what did her mother have to say about all this?”
“She’s lives in upstate New York now, but the years of drug abuse took its toll and she’s in some halfway house now,” Darian said. “One paper interviewed her by phone. She hadn’t seen her daughter in decades, figured she was probably dead. She didn’t have much to say about the backpack or how it might’ve gotten there. I got the impression from the article this woman was pretty much out of it.”
“So it winds up being two separate incidents far as the authorities are concerned.”
“You’ve got Clayton Willis who dies from some unknown and almost unbelievable brain hemorrhage, and nearby a backpack’s found from some kid who ran away over twenty years ago. But there’s no sign of the actual girl or any evidence or indication that would lead them to believe one has anything to do with the other. Both situations were odd to be sure, but as far as they saw it, completely unrelated, particularly after investigating a number of possibilities that yielded no evidence whatsoever.”
Seth ran his hands through his hair, tried desperately to think this through. For some reason Doctor Farrow’s face blinked in his mind just then and a part of him wished he could be sitting in her office talking this out. Doc could calm him, help him sort his thoughts. This must be what it’s like, he thought, to need someone like her to keep someone like me sane and balanced. Is this my life now? Is this what I’ve become?
“It’s going to snow.”
Seth and Darian both looked over at Raymond, who was leaning against the wall, watching the sky through the glass sliders. Just beyond them a small balcony overlooked the parking lot and highway junction beyond.
“Soon,” he said, finishing the thought.
“And we should give a shit why exactly?” Darian cracked. “What are you a fucking weatherman too?”
“Just telling you,” he said, voice laced with emotion. “It’s gonna snow soon.”
“Great. I’m afraid of snow.” Darian let out a burst of awkward, nearly maniacal laughter. “How absurd is that? I’ve never really liked snow, but the idea of it scares the shit out of me now, can you believe that? Ever since that night up there, I—I can’t—why would snow frighten me?”
Think kept repeating in Seth’s head. Think.
“Twenty-four years ago.” Seth let the words linger, thought about them from every conceivable angle. There had to be meaning there. “It couldn’t be the same person, Christy couldn’t be that old. Twenty-four years ago would make her older than I am.”
“Times not always the same,” Raymond said softly, eyes still fixed on the sky as if he were talking to himself.
“I’m getting really tired of this cryptic bullshit.”
“Time’s not always the same…when you’re with them.”
Tell me what you see, Seth.
Darian rose to his feet. “What the fuck does that mean?” He turned to Seth with a frantic expression. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“Twenty-four years,” Seth said.
Just beyond the darkness there was something more.
“You know more than you’re saying.” Darian aimed a finger at Raymond. “I know it. Louis told me. You know more than you’re telling us. You’ve told us what you want us to know but there’s more. You’re holding back the rest and you’re not fooling anyone, Ray. This is tearing our minds—our lives—apart. You have to tell us what you know. You have to, or I swear to God I’ll—”
“I was twelve,” Seth said, suddenly realizing the significance of the timeframe.
Seth? Tell me what you see, please.
“I was twelve,” he said again. “Twenty-four years ago, I was twelve.”
I see Raymond.
He turned to his brother. “And you were eight.”
And what is Raymond doing, Seth?
“That’s when it began, when all this started. Twenty-four years ago.”
Running. He’s…running.
“And that’s how you knew her, wasn’t it?” Seth moved toward him.
Are you running too?
“That’s why you had a look of recognition when you first saw Christy.”
Yes.
“You hadn’t seen her in one of your visions, or whatever the hell they are.”
Is it day or night?
“She looked familiar because you’d seen her before, really seen her.”
Night.
“For real.”
What else do you see?
“You’d seen her twenty-four years ago.”
It’s snowing.
“When you were eight and she was nineteen.”
And he’s so lost.
Raymond, still propped against the wall, began to weep.
He’s so terrified.
“That’s it, isn’t it?”
Why is he so terrified Seth?
“It’s all right, Ray. We’ll beat this, we’ll get through it.”
How old is he in the dream, Seth?
“But you have to tell us what you know.”
How old is Raymond?
“All of it.”
Little, seven or eight. Eight. He’s eight.
“Everything, Ray, do you understand?”
We’re running.
“You have to tell us everything now.”
We’re running in the snow.
“This nightmare began twenty-four years ago. It’s time for it to stop, Ray.”
“What are you talking about?” Darian demanded. “This started a year ago. It started that night at the cabin.”
“Not for us. Not for Raymond.”
Raymond seemed to catch himself, as if he just then realized where he was and what was being said to him. He wiped the tears from his face and staggered away from the wall toward the door. “I have to get out of here.”
They all felt insane, but he looked the part now more than ever. A pang of guilt swept through Seth, and he reached out for his brother. “Stop it, Ray. Help me stop it.”
“Get out of my way.”
“Bullshit.” Darian started toward him. “You’re not going anywhere until—”
Seth held a hand up like a traffic cop to silence Darian then stepped directly into Raymond’s path to the door. “You can’t run, Ray. Not anymore.”
“Back off me, Seth, I mean it.” His hair hung across his face, barely shielding wild eyes. “Back the fuck off me.”
He’d seen that exact look in his brother’s eyes the day he’d attacked Eddie Brock.
“Don’t make me hurt you,” Raymond whispered. “Please.”
Seth slowly stepped to the side.
Raymond gave him a long look that encompassed such a wide
array of emotions it was impossible to discern one in particular. He opened his mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it and instead hustled out the door, slamming it behind him with a loud thud.
Seth felt nauseated and weak, but forced himself back across the room to the sliders and looked out at the lot below.
Slushy snow began to fall, spitting globs of thick runny ice against the sliders.
The fear was becoming more manageable. Was that a good sign or a bad one?
“We’re not going to make it, are we,” Darian said from behind him.
Though it clearly hadn’t been a question, Seth answered anyway. “I don’t know.”
“Why the hell did you let him go?”
“Don’t worry, I’m going after him.”
Darian stood next to Seth. Upon seeing the wet snow he grimaced and turned away, hugging himself as if to ward off a sudden chill. “Don’t give him too much of a lead or you’ll never find him.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Seth watched the sky. “I know exactly where he’s going.”
CHAPTER 20
Close your eyes.
Even then he’d wanted to tell her, to explain his pain and terror, to define it for her. This was no trivial childhood angst, but a remorseless and eternal torment far deadlier than either of them could even hope to comprehend.
But he was as doomed then as he was now, perhaps more so, because as a little boy Raymond had even less capacity to understand and accept the things tormenting him than he did after years of enduring them. Affliction blind no more, the agony remained the same regardless of his years, regardless of time or circumstance. An unending screech in his head, a bloated reptile coiled and trapped within his skull, it nested and waited, its skin leathery, cold and dead, even bathed in the warmth of his blood.
There was no escape. Never had been, never would be. And he knew it even then.
“Momma,” he would whisper, snuggled into her arms as she sat on the edge of his bed, “will you sing a song for me?”
“Of course, honey,” she’d answer, her beautiful face staring down at him through the darkness, eyes blinking slowly. “Lay back now and close your eyes like a good boy.”
“I don’t like to close my eyes.”
“What an odd thing to say, Raymond.” She’d raised an eyebrow and frowned a bit. “Why don’t you like to close your eyes?”
“I don’t like to sleep.”
“But everyone sleeps, sweetheart.”
“I’m not like everyone. I don’t like nighttime.”
“Is that why you don’t like to close your eyes?”
Close your eyes and listen.
I don’t want to close my eyes because that’s what they tell me to do too, Momma. That’s when they come, when I close my eyes in the night. That’s when they see me. That’s when I see them. They know it frightens us, the dark; the night.
“I don’t know,” he murmured.
“Don’t look so pained, Raymond. A little boy should never look so pained.”
I am pain. Not in pain, Momma. I am pain.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry sweetheart,” she’d say, the warmth of her palm pressed tenderly against the side of his face. “Just close your eyes and let me sing you to sleep, all right?”
He knew Seth was in his bed just feet away, listening to everything they said. But his brother never teased him about such things. He was the baby, and sometimes he needed to act like the baby, and that was OK. It was OK with everyone.
Except them.
Close your eyes and see.
Silent and watchful, their disapproving grimaces leering from the shadows.
Close your eyes and be.
“Does God really see us, Momma?’
“Of course, my love, his angels watch over us always.” She smiled. “Remember the story from the Bible I read to you?”
“About the ladder?”
“‘And he dreamed, and beheld a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, and behold the angels of God ascending and descending upon it.’ It’s from Genesis, do you remember?”
He nodded. “Jacob’s Ladder.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you sure they’re angels, Momma?”
Her smile slowly vanished. “What else would they be, sweetheart?”
Beyond anything you could imagine.
What he wouldn’t give for one more night. To be tucked into bed and to have his mother there with him, singing quietly, her fingers stroking his hair as he drifted off to sleep. What he wouldn’t give for that love and warmth just once more.
She only survived in his dreams now, but even then her presence was rare.
Just as well. His dreams were diseased.
Close your eyes, Raymond.
White…he remembered the white. How blinding and pure it was, shining there all around him like a flood of fluorescent light. Moving, walking slowly into the light, it bled free to reveal a room—an empty room—everything white. The walls, floor, ceiling, all of it stark white and empty, sterile, soulless and artificial.
“What is this place?”
Close your eyes and dream.
Then she was there too. His first memories of her were there, in the bright white room. She was older than he was but still young. And pretty. He remembered he thought she was pretty.
“Where am I?”
Close your eyes and pray.
He knew then she was as lost and uncertain as he was.
“What’s happening?” she asked, her voice hollow, as if she were much further away than only a few feet. “What’s happening to us?”
There was an unmistakable loneliness to this place, and loneliness was something with which Raymond was deeply familiar. Even the silence seemed unnatural here. Forced and staged, it was a space better suited to whispers and mute gesture, like a library, perhaps a church…or a cellblock. He didn’t know it then, but in years to come he would learn that in night they often became so very quiet.
Except for those particularly dark nights when screams shattered illusions of safety—
Close your eyes and see the truth.
—and all that was evil and vile became close enough to touch. Lucifer’s thorny wings, stained with bloody tears of angels and drool of demons alike, flapped through darkness, summoning the winds of Hell against an ancient fresco painted along the interiors of his mind. Monsters, legends, nightmares and myths expertly filed, defined and conjured on command to in some way make sense of the entities pursuing him.
When you see us—really see us—you want to look away, but can’t.
“Do you know what’s happening to us?” she persisted.
Raymond shook his head no.
“It’s all right,” she said, smiling at him. “Don’t be afraid, OK?”
He could tell she was lying, that she was just as scared as he was and only doing her best to comfort him because he was younger than she was. But even all these years later the memory of that smile had never left him. In part because it was so beautiful, in part because for an instant it had made him feel better, but more because it was the last thing he saw before he began to fall.
We are the ground.
Hurtling, plunging downward, it ended in total darkness, the light reduced to a mere pinpoint from above.
We are the sky.
Screams—her screams—echoed down, found him, rained down on him in a horrible shower of lunacy. There was something else up there with her now and it was frightening her, hurting her but—but then a new sound distracted him, and he realized he too was no longer alone, deep in this pit. There was something else down here with him. He could hear it moving. He could feel it near him.
We are the wind.
The sensation of being strapped down followed, secured with what appeared to be thick brown leather-like harnesses of some kind, various old and rusted metal contraptions littered along the periphery of his vision.
We are the e
arth.
“Momma?” he gasped, tears spilling free as terror consumed him. “Momma!”
Devils and gods both.
Faint wheezing and labored breath swirled in the darkness around him.
Help me, Momma. Please help me.
We are you, Raymond. We are you.
“Is this Hell?” he gasped.
Something nearby shuffled closer. “Not yet,” it whispered.
And then it was Raymond’s turn to scream.
He abandoned his memories, found himself running, staggering across familiar terrain, the cold air burning his eyes and causing them to tear as a wet snow spattered down around him. He knew he was crying and calling out, could hear traces of his voice in the air around him, in the forest before him, but the world was blurry and spinning and he was tumbling to the ground before he could stop himself.
As he rolled onto all-fours, his hair hanging down into his eyes, he glimpsed two dark figures standing at the far end of the field he had just crossed.
One separated from the other and started toward him.
Seth was right. He couldn’t run. Not anymore.
CHAPTER 21
Darian could tell by the way Seth negotiated the streets that he had driven them before. There had been virtually no conversation on the way there, and he’d decided not to push the issue. Whatever tied these two brothers together bound him to them as well, and any secrets revealed only served to help him too. They were one now, the three of them—four, if Louis lived—and nothing could change that. The idea of unity, of many being one, reminded him of his family. It was the first time in hours he’d thought of Cynthia and Debra in any meaningful context, and he found himself wondering if they’d still be there when he finally gathered the courage to return home. Would things—could things—ever be the same?
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