by Rob Horner
"Remember," I called out to Tanya, "don't show off your power. It only took a single day for the demons to take over my school. They might have already begun in yours."
"I know, I know," she said with mock exasperation. "And don't worry, Dad, if I see any statues, I'll run."
Crystal and I spent most of the day roaming around the Coliseum Mall. It may be different with today's youth, but back then, you really had to worry about mall security and truant officers making the rounds, looking for kids skipping school. Neither Crystal nor I had baby-faces, which helped some, and we strolled like a married couple, visiting the bank branch inside the mall, where I withdrew two hundred dollars. To mall security, there's a world of difference between two teenagers loitering and young-looking adults purchasing things from various stores. We shopped and spent money, and they left us alone. We didn't spend a lot, but we needed clothes more appropriate for the plans percolating in my head. I didn't know what, exactly, to do about the carnival, but we had to do something.
Jet black was our theme. Black sweatshirts, dark jeans, black boots. We wanted Night Ops, but we ended up with stylish Goth. It made me feel better, thinking we'd have a better chance of not being seen. We spent a few minutes in a sporting goods store too, then headed to Spencer's Gifts, our last stop.
Crystal spotted one other gifted person in the mall, a young and attractive Hispanic girl, working behind the counter at a small hot dog stand in the food court. We tried striking up a conversation with her, but her vocabulary seemed to be limited to the very basics needed to do her job.
Crystal continued to look at the girl after our attempted conversation. "What's wrong?" I asked.
"I just noticed that her glow is really faint, almost nonexistent. When you were standing next to her, it's like she wasn't glowing at all."
"Didn't you say Tanya glowed brighter than me?"
She nodded. "I wonder if it means anything."
"Maybe it's a measure of our relative strength," I suggested, putting into words the theory that had occurred to me the day before, while people-watching in Taco Bell.
She shrugged, then looked down. "I wonder if that's why I can't see myself. Am I that weak too?"
"I was thinking it might be like a stinky dog," I said, and she raised her eyebrows at me.
"So, I'm a stinky dog?"
I laughed. "No, I mean, dogs can't smell their own scents, no matter how badly they need a bath."
"So, I'm weak, and stinky." Her arms crossed under her breasts.
I was pretty sure she was only pretending to be offended, but I wanted to finish the analogy as quickly as possible, just in case she wasn't. "I mean, you might not be able to see your own light the way a dog can't smell its own scent."
"Uh huh," she said, smiling now.
Once she took my hand, I felt better about asking a question that had troubled me since we first learned of her ability. "Doesn't it bother you, seeing a glow whenever you look at me?"
"Not really," she answered. "It's not there all the time, only when I'm really looking at you. And I figured out how to turn it off completely, so it's no problem at all now. Why did you ask?"
I coughed nervously. "Well, I...um...like looking at you and wanted to, you know, make sure you liked looking at me."
"So, first you compare me to a dog, then you want me to stroke your ego?"
We were almost back to the car before she let it go. "Don't worry, I do like looking at you."
This time we parked a few houses away and waited for Tanya to come home before entering with her. While we waited, Crystal and I tried to come up with ideas on how we'd get out of the house to go practice our powers without alarming Mrs. Fields.
We soon learned it wouldn't be a problem. Tuesday nights were Bridge Night for Barbara. She left at nine-thirty, admonishing us not to stay up too late, and again reminding me of my promise.
"Don't worry about her coming home," Tanya said after she'd left. "The old ladies will play Bridge until about two in the morning. And most of them will spend the night at the hostess' house."
"Why wouldn't she come home?" I asked.
"Because after four solid hours of Bloody Mary’s, Bridge, and more Bloody Mary’s, she won't be in any condition to drive."
Tanya had been uncharacteristically quiet for most of the afternoon. After her mother left, I managed to corner her in the kitchen. "Is something wrong?"
She didn't answer at first, just leaned over the kitchen sink, hands planted on the edge of the counter, looking out through the window at the backyard. "I'm worried, John," she said finally.
I put on a smile that felt so real I almost convinced myself. "It'll be fine. Everything's going to be okay." Gently, my left hand reached up for her shoulder.
She turned away from the sink, and her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked with tears. Seeing my smile, she tried on one of her own, with heartbreaking effect. It wasn't right, for her to be so sad. I wished we'd gone somewhere else, rather than bringing this to her doorstep.
But then her head was nestled in the soft area between my neck and chest, and my arms were around her, holding her. My right hand stroked her hair, soft as silk, while I made meaningless soothing sounds. Something wasn't right here, but I didn't know which questions to ask to find out what.
"I thought," she whispered, "that after losing my dad, the worst was over."
I had to concentrate to hear her, had to focus past the distracting tickle of her hair in my face, the occasional brush of her lips against the skin of my neck.
"I thought, you know, nothing else could be as bad, maybe we'd suffered enough and earned some good times."
I didn't say anything, somehow knowing nothing I said would be right, not then.
She fell silent, but her arms tightened behind me, hugging, holding. Her head hadn't moved. "And then you..." Her hands released, came up to my shoulders. "...I don't want to lose you, too."
Even then, sixteen and ignorant of almost every aspect of the fairer sex, I doubted that's what she'd meant to say. There was a pressure on my shoulders as she pushed herself up, separating us. There was an uncertainty to it. Her face came up, bottomless dark eyes only an inch below mine, our faces separated by a whisper.
It was one of those moments, where the flinch of a muscle can make all the difference in an outcome, where one wrong word, a look, an unchecked impulse, can make or break a story.
Like most people, I believe in my own sense of morality. I want to be thought well of, want to be one of those guys you can trust. I've made mistakes in my life, and I don't deny them. Many of those mistakes will come to light during the telling of this story, and we'll discuss the lessons learned and explore my growth from those lessons.
Had her eyes been closed, or her lips slightly parted, we'd have kissed. Had the slight pressure of her hands on my shoulders changed in the least, we'd have kissed. We had a four-year history together, a friendship that hadn’t evolved into a romantic relationship, though deep down, we both believed it would, some day. Despite what I had been through with Crystal, it was a candle beside a bonfire compared to the bonds Tanya and I had developed. She was beautiful. She let herself be vulnerable with me. And I was sixteen.
One moment, and everything would be different. I knew that it wouldn't feel like kissing a sister this time.
The moment passed, and we separated. My hands fell to my sides, and hers came up to wipe away her tears.
"Just promise me you'll be careful," she said finally.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. My heart pounded and my palms felt suddenly sweaty. Though nothing had happened, something had changed within me. I couldn't take my eyes off her face, couldn't shake the feel of her nestled against me. I turned to head back to the living room, meeting Crystal, who'd returned from the bathroom while Tanya and I were...talking.
We turned on the television and watched several news stories, beginning with the ten o'clock Fox broadcast, before switching to CBS at eleven.
Both stations ran a short feature on the bright lights from Sunday night, though scientists were no closer to determining a cause. There hadn't been any noticeable changes in the atmosphere, no apparent effect on the environment, or plant growth, or animal behavior.
One talking head, an astronomer with NASA, reported several streaking anomalies noted by Hubble Telescope operators earlier in the day on Sunday, many hours before the lights shot down. No correlation was initially made, because of the time difference, and both the newscaster and the scientist were adamant that no correlation was implied even now. The anomalies were documented because that's what Hubble does, but even with single-frame image enhancement, there was no definite determination of what the streaking objects were. The common theory remained a few isolated pieces of debris, the outer bands of a small body meteor shower.
Fox was the only station to carry the Hubble story, which wasn't unusual. Only five years old at this point, the network had a history of exploring the fringes of popular news stories, trying to find ways of looking at things that differentiated them from the big three powerhouse news outlets.
While Fox gave up three minutes to the Hubble angle, CBS covered several scenes of apparent spontaneous mob actions, which flashed and flared as briefly as a lightning strike, then faded away just as fast. Anchorman Michael Graves, in his trusted baritone, smoothly tied the appearance of the lights to several outbreaks of mob violence, random acts of person on person violence, that led to more than a hundred deaths and a similar number of disappearances worldwide, but no arrests.
Though it had been two days since the event, the story hadn't been reported sooner because it took some time to verify the details and corroborate the timing, but Michael could now say, with certainty, that within minutes of the lights flashing down onto the Earth, violence broke out in numerous cities around the world.
After a commercial break, Michael returned with a guest sitting at the anchor table between him and his co-anchor, a blond named Tracy Snow. The guest was clad in a brown tweed sport coat, leather patches protecting the elbows. He seemed to have embraced the eccentric professor look, complete with circular spectacles, and slightly wild, white hair poking out at crazy angles from his head.
"Stepping away from the science aspect and into the muddled world of mental health, here's Doctor Guilland, noted psychologist and author of the book Your Brain Lies to You with his take," Michael said.
"Thank you, Michael," the professor said. "As we discussed before the show, I believe it's possible that the lights, themselves, are the cause of the violence."
"How so?" Tracy asked, an innocent smile on her face.
"There are well-documented instances of certain light patterns bringing about epileptic-like seizures in people with no history of epilepsy. There have been multiple studies throughout history, some very horrible things like what the Nazis did in their concentration camps, where the goal was to induce psychosis, or control someone else's mind. Project Artichoke is an example of one such, and that was done by our own government."
"Surely you aren't suggesting this was intentional," Michael interjected.
"I'm not suggesting anything about the cause," the doctor answered. "I'm merely postulating past research might hold an answer for how a series of flashing white lights could induce a sort of mass hysteria, or mass psychosis, in witnesses. Keep in mind that numerous eyewitness reports include watching people flail wildly, or thrash about like those in the throes of a seizure."
"Would it help explain some of the weirder stories we've been getting," Tracy asked, "like the flying man who was seen over the Black Forest in Germany yesterday? Or the report we have that a mugging victim, a woman, screamed so loud that she blew out the glass store windows all along the Rue de la Gare in Marseilles, France last night?"
Even though there was an obvious air of staging about the interview--you could see the woman's eyes moving as she read the questions from a TelePrompTer--the question seemed to catch the professor off guard. "Yes, well, as to that, there is no debate that auditory and visual hallucinations often precede a descent into psychosis. In Your Brain Lies to You, for example, I document how, quite frequently, we process stimuli to have a meaning very different from what actually happened."
"How would that pertain to what Tracy asked about?" Michael said.
"Oh God," Crystal whispered. "They're both demons!"
"What?" Tanya asked.
On the television, the professor answered, "If something, let's say the flash of light, were in a particular wavelength or pattern that might cause a seizure in some people, there would be others who might resist the dramatic reaction in favor of more subtle effects."
"The...the reporters...it's hard to see with the backdrop, but they both have the red glow."
The television station had the word LIVE in the bottom right corner, just over the current time.
"So," Michael said, and he wasn't reading from a script, "the same light which caused many people to riot may also be the cause behind the numerous reports of sudden seizures, and the hallucinations, which so far have taken the form of everything from flying men to hell hounds running through the street?"
"I hadn't heard the...hell hounds was it?" the professor asked. "But yes, theoretically, all of the strange things that have happened over the past two days could be blamed on the strange light pattern."
"Which is the point of your book, isn't it?" Tracy asked. "Our brains can lie to us?"
"Is the professor a demon, too?" Tanya asked.
Crystal shook her head.
They were giving the professor a chance to make his claim to fame, tying his work to current events and legitimizing it in such a way that it would become an instant bestseller, and he didn't miss the opportunity.
"That's exactly what the book is about, thank you, Tracy."
The camera zoomed in, leaving the wide frame that showed all three and once more focusing solely on Michael Graves. "There you have it, folks. The brain can lie, especially if it’s given the right motivation. We'll be back with sports after these brief messages."
The screen cut to a commercial for fabric softener, with its trademark light brown teddy bear talking from under a pile of blankets.
"They're trying to make it so that if people see a demon, they won't believe it," Crystal said.
"They're propagandizing," Tanya echoed.
It made sense, in an Orwellian fashion. Take over the main source of information for the general public, and you had a stranglehold on shaping public opinion. By putting forth the idea that anyone who came forward claiming to have seen something monstrous must be suffering an ill effect from an atmospheric event, you hide the real danger, at least for a while.
The local CBS affiliate, WTKR, had its broadcast station on Boush Street in Norfolk, Virginia, which was only a fifteen-minute drive from the mall in Virginia Beach where the demons first appeared. Once you accepted they were real, an existential threat to humanity, was anything impossible? They got to our teachers overnight, were ready to bring an entire student body into their ranks the next day. Capturing the local media outlets seemed like a logical next step.
"We've got to get ready," Crystal said, rising and turning off the television.
Chapter 18
Trials...
Though the moon was riding high and bright, it wasn't always visible, slipping in and out behind a broken screen of clouds, so that the night sky glowed dully, the lunar light spread out diffusely. Crystal, Tanya, and I rode in silence, turning left onto Mercury Boulevard, heading toward the coliseum. We'd discussed several possible places for our nighttime training session and couldn't come up with any other suitable options. I'd been to the Hampton Coliseum several times, both during business hours and after, and there was no place better suited within ten miles.
Having grown up here, Tanya agreed. The vast landscape of parking lots and grassy fields on the opposite side of the huge building from the carnival grounds would be perfect for us,
away from the major roads, and well beyond sight or hearing of the carnies, giving us absolute privacy.
Both Tanya and I had practiced driving in those parking lots, and there was a row, all the way at the back, where the lots gave onto undeveloped fields. It was one of those places, quiet and secluded, where couples would park on weekends. We'd never gotten that far in our relationship, which was probably a good thing, since it meant there was no need to feel guilty about coming back out here.
So why did I feel so mixed up?
The streets between Tanya's house and the coliseum were nearly deserted and we made excellent time, arriving at the front of the massive structure in only five minutes. The major lanes leading to the Coliseum split ten yards in from Coliseum Drive. With the carnival set up on the right side, we took the left fork. We drove with the headlights off, going slow, trusting in the moon and the streetlights to keep me from bumping into any curbs. Because of the coliseum's status as a multi-purpose venue, the first in the area, the parking lots cover more land than would seem possible, extending for two hundred yards away from the building in almost every direction.
Built in 1968, the Hampton Coliseum was the first large, multi-purpose arena in the area. After decades of rock concerts and sporting events, the Coliseum made history in 1981 as the location of the first live pay-per-view broadcast of a rock concert. The Rolling Stones played the final stop on their 1981 tour there, with a special memory for one lucky fan, who rushed the stage, only to get walloped in the head by Keith Richard's guitar, swung by Keith Richards himself!
Only recently, in 1989, the Coliseum gained nationwide attention again when The Grateful Dead recorded their Formerly the Warlocks album, live.
Thankfully, nothing was going on this Tuesday night, and we drove in hushed silence, windows open, straining our ears for any sound which might indicate we'd been seen.
Curving around to the left, moving in darkness, we could see the lights of the carnival far across the asphalt, reds and white and blues flickering, flashing. The entire area over there was awash in artificial light, high-powered bulbs that drove shadows away. Perhaps, with only one more full day before the show was to open, there were still carnies at work, setting up rides. Or maybe they always kept the midway lit to enhance security and discourage thieves. It was weird, trying to ascribe normal human reasons for why things were happening in a group that was clearly not human. Who knows? Maybe the lights were healthy for them, a way to maintain the hellish glow to their skin.