The Touch

by F. Paul Wilson

  Turning her flashlight off, Sylvia steeled herself and crept softly along the hall until she got to the front foyer. A distant flash of lightning flickered through the still-open door, reflecting off wet footprints on the floor and backlighting a dark figure starting up the stairs.

  “Alan?”

  The figure didn’t reply, but continued to climb. It seemed to be limping as it took the steps one at a time. Ba had said that Alan was limping when he left Chac’s. It had to be him.

  She flicked on the flashlight and angled the beam until she caught his face.

  Yes, it was Alan, and yet it was not Alan. His face was slack, his eyes vacant. He was different.

  “Alan—don’t go up there.”

  Alan glanced her way, squinting in the beam of light.

  “Jeffy,” he said in a voice she barely recognized.

  Cajole him, she told herself. Talk him down. He’s not all there.

  She held the light under her own face. “It’s me—Sylvia. Don’t go to Jeffy now. He’s asleep. You’ll only disturb him. Maybe you’ll frighten him.”

  “Jeffy,” was all that Alan said.

  And then the lights came on.

  Sylvia gasped at the sight of Alan in his entirety. He looked terrible. Wet, dirty, his hair matted and twisted by wind and rain, and his eyes—they were Alan’s and yet not Alan’s.

  He continued up the stairs one at a time at his painfully slow pace, moving like an automaton.

  With fear and pity mixing inside her, Sylvia started toward him. “Don’t go up there, Alan. I don’t want you to. At least not now.”

  He was halfway up the staircase now and didn’t look around. He simply said, “Jeffy.”

  “No, Alan!” She ran up the stairs until she was beside him. “I don’t want you to go near him! Not like this. Not the way you are.”

  The lights wavered, flicked off for a second, then came back on.

  “Jeffy!”

  Fear had taken over now. There was no longer any question in her mind that Alan was completely deranged. In the distance she heard a siren. If it was the police, she wished they were coming here, but it was too late to call them now. She couldn’t let Alan near Jeffy. She’d have to stop him herself.

  She grabbed his arm. “Alan, I’m telling you now—”

  With a spasmodic jerk of his left arm, he elbowed her away, slamming her back against the banister. Sylvia winced at the pain in her ribs, but what hurt more was that Alan did not even look around to see what he had done.

  The siren was louder now, almost as if it were passing directly in front of the house. Sylvia scurried up to the top of the stairs ahead of Alan and faced him, blocking his way.

  “Stop, Alan! Stop right there!”

  But he kept on coming, trying to squeeze by to her left. She tightened her grip on the banister and wouldn’t let him pass. She was so close to him now, and she could see the determination in his eyes. He pressed against her with desperate strength as the lights flickered again and the siren’s wail became deafeningly loud.

  “Jeffy!”

  “No!”

  He grabbed her arms to push her aside and then everything happened at once. Pain—it started at her core and began to boil within her, tearing at her, making her feel as if she were being turned inside out. Her vision dimmed. She heard a pounding sound—footsteps on the stairs or the blood in her ears?

  Then Ba’s voice shouted, “Missus, no!”

  She felt an impact that knocked the wind out of her, felt strong arms around her, lifting her, carrying her, falling to the floor with her.

  Sylvia’s vision cleared as the pain faded away. She was lying on the second-floor landing. Ba was beside her, breathing hard, a bloody bandage around his head.

  “Missus! Missus!” he was saying, shaking her. “You all right, Missus?”

  “Yes, I think so.” She saw Alan limp by. He looked down at her, and for a moment seemed to start toward her, a confused and concerned look on his face. Then he turned away, as if drawn by an invisible cord, continuing on his path toward Jeffy’s room. “Alan, come back!”

  “He must go, Missus,” Ba said soothingly as he restrained her. “You must not try to stop him.”

  “But why?”

  “Perhaps because he has always wanted to help the Boy, and perhaps his time with the Dat-tay-vao is near its end and he must complete this final task. But you must not try to stop him.”

  “But he could die!”

  “As you would have died if you had barred his way any longer.”

  There was a note of such finality in Ba’s voice, and such unfailing certainty in his eyes, that Sylvia did not dare ask how he knew.

  The lights went out again.

  Sylvia looked down the hall and saw Alan’s shadowy form turn into Jeffy’s room. She wanted to scream for him to stop, to run down the hall and grab him by the ankles. But Ba held her back.

  Alan disappeared through Jeffy’s doorway. A pale glow suddenly filled the room and spilled out into the hall.

  “No!” she cried and broke away from Ba. Something awful was going to happen. She just knew it.

  She rolled to her feet and ran down the hall, but was brought to a halt for a frozen second as a child’s cry of pain and fear split the silent darkness.

  And then the cry took form.

  “Mommy! Mommy-Mommy!”

  Sylvia’s knees buckled. That voice! God, that voice! It was Jeffy! The lights flickered again as she forced herself forward, through the door, and into the room.

  By the glow of his Donald Duck night-light she could see Jeffy crouched against the wall in the corner of his bed.

  “Mommy!” he said, rising to his knees and holding his arms out to her. “Mommy!”

  Sylvia staggered forward, heart pounding, mouth dry. This couldn’t be true! This kind of thing only happens in fairy tales!

  Yet there he was, this beautiful little boy, looking at her, seeing her, calling for her. Half-blinded by tears, she ran forward and gathered him up against her. His arms went around her neck and squeezed.

  It was true! He was really cured!

  “Oh, Jeffy! Jeffy! Jeffy!”

  “Mommy,” he said in a clear, high voice. “That man hurt me!”

  “Man? What—?” Oh, God! Alan! She frantically looked around the room.

  And then she saw him, crumpled on the floor like a pile of wet rags in the shadows by the foot of the bed.

  And he wasn’t moving. God in heaven, he wasn’t even breathing!

  AUGUST

  52

  Jeffy

  Jeffy felt a warm inner glow at the sight of Dr. Bulmer. It was always the same whenever he saw him. He didn’t know exactly why; he just knew that he loved the man, almost as much as Mommy.

  Jeffy stood beside his mother now as Mr. Ba pushed Dr. Bulmer’s wheelchair through the front door and into the house. It had been a month since the doctor had been carried out of Jeffy’s room and rushed to the hospital. He still didn’t look too good, but he looked better than he had that night.

  Jeffy would never forget that night. It was as if his life had begun then. He could remember very little before it. But that night…the world had become a glorious new place that night, opening up like one of the morning flowers in the garden when the sun shone on it.

  Life before then had been like a dream; half-remembered, disjointed scenes from that time flashed sporadically in his new wakeful state. Everything now seemed new and not-new, as if he had been here before, seen and done so many things before, and forgotten them. Seeing them again was like a gentle jog to his memory, causing a burst of recognition in which pieces out of nowhere seemed to fall into place.

  Mommy said that everything good that had happened to him since that night was because of Dr. Bulmer. Maybe that was why he got such a good feeling whenever he saw the doctor.

  Mommy took over the job of pushing the wheelchair and started talking to Dr. Bulmer. She always talked to him. Jeffy had noticed that on the t
imes when he had visited the doctor in the hospital. Mommy talked and talked, even though the doctor hardly ever answered her back. She pushed him into the room that the men had been working on for the past few weeks.

  “Remember this place, Alan?” she said. “We spent some time here, you and I.”

  “I…I think so,” he said in his flat voice.

  “Used to be the library. Now it’s your room. You’re going to stay here until your legs are strong enough to get you up and down the stairs. We’re going to have doctors and physical therapists and speech therapists coming and going in and out of here like there’s no tomorrow. You’re getting better every day. Two weeks ago you couldn’t even speak; now you’re talking. And you’re going to keep on getting better. And Jeffy and I are going to help you. You’re going to be the same person you used to be.” Mommy’s voice got sort of choked-sounding for a second. “I swear it. No matter how long it takes, I swear it!”

  “How was I?” he said.

  “You were the greatest. Still are, in my book.”

  She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. For a moment Jeffy was afraid she was going to cry again. She didn’t cry as much now as she used to, but she still did it a lot. Jeffy didn’t like to see her cry.

  “Jeffy,” she said, turning to him. He saw that she wasn’t going to cry. Not now, anyway. “Why don’t you take Mess and Phemus out in the yard for a while. They’ve been cooped up in the house all morning. But stay away from the dock. The tide’s in and I don’t want you getting wet.”

  “Goody!” He felt like running around himself. He scooped Mess up from her sunny spot on the window seat, then slapped his hand against his thigh. Phemus came running from the back room. And then they were out into the yard and the warm August air.

  As Mess stalked off into the bushes, Jeffy found a stick and began to toss it for Phemus to chase. On the third throw, it caught in the branches of one of the peach trees—the one Mommy called The New Tree, the one with the really big peaches. With Phemus barking and running in circles around him, Jeffy tried to climb up to retrieve it. He succeeded only in scraping his legs and shaking loose a few of the riper peaches.

  They looked good. As he bent to pick one up, Mess strolled out of the bushes and approached him. She was carrying something in her mouth…something that moved. Mess deposited the gift in front of Jeffy and walked off.

  It was a bird. Jeffy looked down with horrid fascination at its bloody, mangled wing as it struggled in vain to right itself.

  His heart went out to the poor creature. As he reached out, it cheeped weakly and flapped its good wing to get away.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said.

  Maybe he could keep it and feed it and fix its wing. Then the bird would be his very own pet. As he gathered the wounded creature into his hands, he felt a sudden thrill run up his arms.

  It felt so good!

  And then the bird was squawking and fluttering its suddenly perfect wings. It wriggled free of his grasp and took to the air. It soared, circling once over his head, then it flew off into the trees.

  Jeffy didn’t understand what had happened, but he felt good.

  Somehow the bird’s wing had been made all better. Had he done that? He didn’t know. He’d have to try it again sometime. Maybe he could even make Dr. Bulmer all better. That would make Mommy happy. Sure. Maybe he’d try that someday. Right now he was more interested in the peach that lay before him on the grass. He picked it up and took a big bite.

  Delicious!

  Afterword

  THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD

  The preponderance of my work deals with a history of the world that remains undiscovered, unexplored, and unknown to most of humanity. Some of this secret history has been revealed in the Adversary Cycle, some in the Repairman Jack novels, and bits and pieces in other, seemingly unconnected works. Taken together, even these millions of words barely scratch the surface of what has been going on behind the scenes, hidden from the workaday world. I’ve listed them below in chronological order. (NB: Year Zero is the end of civilization as we know it; Year Zero Minus One is the year preceding it, etc.)

  The Past:

  “Demonstrong” (prehistory)

  Black Wind (1926–1945)

  The Keep (1941)

  Reborn (February-March 1968)

  “Day-Tay-Vao” (March 1968)

  Jack: Secret Histories (1983)

  Year Zero Minus Three:

  Sibs (February)

  “Faces” (early summer)

  The Tomb (summer)

  “The Barrens” (ends in September)*

  “The Wringer”

  “A Day in the Life” (October)*

  “The Long Way Home”

  Legacies (December)

  Year Zero Minus Two:

  Conspiracies (April) (includes “Home Repairs”)

  All the Rage (May) (includes “The Last Rakosh”)

  Hosts (June)

  The Haunted Air (August)

  Gateways (September)

  Crisscross (November)

  Infernal (December)

  Year Zero Minus One:

  Harbingers (January)

  Bloodline (April)

  The Touch (ends in August)

  The Peabody-Ozymandias Traveling Circus & Oddity Emporium (ends in September)

  “Tenants”*

  yet-to-be-written Repairman Jack novels

  Year Zero:

  “Pelts”*

  Reprisal (ends in February)

  the last Repairman Jack novel (will end in April)

  Nightworld (starts in May)

  Reborn, The Touch, and Reprisal will be back in print before too long. I’m planning a total of sixteen or seventeen Repairman Jack novels (not counting the young adult titles), ending the Secret History with the publication of a heavily revised Nightworld.

  Foreword

  I’d originally intended to use a much shorter version of “Dat-tay-vao” as either a flashback or a prologue in The Touch, but no matter how I tried to work it in, it simply wouldn’t fit. Used early on, it gave away too much of the mystery of what would be happening to Alan Bulmer in the body of the novel; inserted later, it seemed redundant. So I scrapped it.

  After the novel was finished, I returned to it and fleshed it out to make it a stand-alone story—a prequel to The Touch. It appeared in the March 1987 issue of Amazing Stories. The story takes place exactly nineteen years before its publication…right about the time of Reborn, another novel in the Secret History of the World (see the Afterword). The events in Reborn trigger the Dat-tay-vao’s migration to the United States, where it plays an important part in the Secret History, as you will see when the revised Nightworld is published down the road.

  This is the first time the story and novel have appeared in the same volume. I wanted them together so that readers introduced to the Secret History via my young adult novels like Jack: Secret Histories could see the character they know as Weird Walt at the beginning and end of his devastating involvement with the Dat-tay-vao.

  F. PAUL WILSON

  DAT-TAY-VAO

  1

  Patsy cupped his hands gently over his belly to keep his intestines where they belonged. Weak, wet, and helpless, he lay on his back in the alley and looked up at the stars in the crystal sky, unable to move, afraid to call out. The one time he’d yelled loud enough to be heard all the way to the street, loops of bowel had squirmed against his hands, feeling like a pile of Mom’s slippery-slick homemade sausage all gray from boiling and coated with her tomato sauce. Visions of his insides surging from the slit in his abdomen like spring snakes from a novelty can of nuts had kept him from yelling again.

  No one had come.

  He knew he was dying. Good as dead, in fact. He could feel the blood oozing out of the vertical gash in his belly, seeping around his fingers and trailing down his forearms to the ground. Wet from neck to knees. Probably lying in a pool of blood…his very own homemade marinara sauce.

  He
lp was maybe fifty feet away and he couldn’t call for it. Even if he could stand the sight of his guts jumping out of him, he no longer had the strength to yell. Yet help was out there…the night sounds of Quang Ngai street life…so near…

  Nothing ever goes right for me. Nothing. Ever.

  It had been such a sweet deal. Six keys of Cambodian brown. He could’ve got that home to Flatbush no sweat and then he’d have been set up real good. Uncle Tony would’ve known what to do with the stuff and Patsy would’ve been made. And he’d never be called Fatman again. Only the grunts over here called him Fatman. He’d be Pasquale to the old boys, and Pat to the younger guys.

  And Uncle Tony would’ve called him Kid, like he always did.

  Yeah. Would have. If Uncle Tony could see him now, he’d call him Shit-for-Brains. He could hear him now:

  Six keys for ten G’s? Whatsamatta witchoo? Din’t I always tell you if it seems too good to be true, it usually is? Ay! Gabidose! Din’t you smell no rat?

  Nope. No rat smell. Because I didn’t want to smell a rat. Too eager for the deal. Too anxious for the quick score. Too damn stupid as usual to see how that sleazeball Hung was playing me like a hooked fish.

  No Cambodian brown.

  No deal.

  Just a long, sharp K-bar.

  The stars above went fuzzy and swam around, then came into focus again.

  The pain had been awful at first, but that was gone now. Except for the cold, it was almost like getting smashed and crashed on scotch and grass and just drifting off. Almost pleasant. Except for the cold. And the fear.

  Footsteps…coming from the left. He managed to turn his head a few degrees. A lone figure approached, silhouetted against the light from the street. A slow, unsteady, almost staggering walk. Whoever it was didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Hung? Come to finish him off?