Milo tried again. “Did you sleep well?”
This time he was rewarded with an enthusiastic nodding of his prisoner’s head even as she whimpered and tears streamed down her now-filthy face. A snot bubble blew out of her nose and Milo shook his head, disgusted. He crossed the room and retrieved a tissue, then held it under Rae Ann’s nose and she blew with gusto.
“Now,” he said softly. “What you need to understand is that I expect you to answer promptly when I speak to you. Things will proceed much more smoothly between us if you do. Is that understood?”
This time there was no hesitation. The young hooker again nodded enthusiastically.
“Much better,” Milo said, reaching into his left rear pocket and withdrawing an X-Acto knife. “See? We’re getting along beautifully now.”
At the sight of the knife, Rae Ann’s eyes widened again in panic and she began breathing heavily, nearly panting.
Milo said, “Relax, before you give yourself a stroke,” and then he leaned down and deftly sliced the duct tape holding the blood-soaked towel in place over her right hand. The towel unwound and fell to the floor, revealing a hand featuring three hideously misshapen digits.
The nails were missing from Rae Ann’s first three fingers. They were gone, torn out last night with Milo’s pliers, and the tips of all three fingers were now swollen and purple, twice their normal size. The blood had more or less clotted overnight but still oozed sluggishly, pooling on her fingertips now that the towel had been removed, then dripping onto the clear plastic tarp covering the floor in fat blackish-red globules.
Milo felt a surge of excitement as he viewed his handiwork. “What have you done to yourself?” he asked with false concern, removing the pliers from his pocket and snapping them in front of Rae Ann’s face to observe her reaction. He wasn’t disappointed. Just as she had done when she saw the knife, she panicked. Her eyes widened and her head thrashed and she whimpered desperately into her gag, her terror complete.
“I’m just teasing you,” he said. “We’ll play again, don’t you worry about that, but the fun will begin later. I’d hate to get the reputation around town of being a poor host, so how does a little breakfast sound?”
His victim gazed up disbelievingly. Her desperate whining noises stopped but her tears continued to fall as she waited to see what would happen next.
“Silly me,” Milo continued. “You probably have to go to the bathroom. It’s been a long night, hasn’t it?”
He waited for a response and got none. The girl sat completely still, as if confused by this unexpected turn of events, her eyes locked on his. He bent down without another word and retrieved his X-Acto knife. He sliced the rest of the duct tape from the girl’s limbs and helped her to her feet. He led her unsteadily across the room and down a short hallway, turning into a grungy bathroom. He indicated the tiny stand-up shower with a flourish, like a Realtor showing a mansion to a prospective buyer, turning to her with a smile and saying, “Play your cards right and maybe you’ll get to clean up later. For now, though, just do your business and come back out. I’m going to show a little trust and give you some privacy. Fuck with me at all, even a little bit, and the next time you’ll be peeing in front of me, probably into your clothes.”
He turned and paused at the door of the bathroom. “Oh, by the way,” he said. “Before you get any bright ideas, everything that could possibly be used as a weapon has been removed from this room, as has the toilet, as you have undoubtedly noticed. Just squat over the hole in the floor, do your business and come out. Are we on the same page here?” The duct-tape gag remained in place so she nodded, the seemingly unending supply of tears still flowing down her face.
“One more thing,” he added with an impish smile. “Just kidding about the shower. The water hasn’t worked in this building since before you were born, probably.” Milo stepped through the doorway and pulled the flimsy wooden door shut behind him, waiting on the other side. Moments later the door swung open and his guest appeared, eyes downcast. He took her by the elbow and led her back to her chair where he picked up his roll of duct tape and expertly re-secured her in a matter of seconds.
After taping her ankles to the chair, he said, still crouched on the floor, “Now, back to my original question: What would you like for breakfast? I don’t have a lot of choices but I might be able to find something that would be acceptable, unless of course you’re one of those chicks that eat nuts and berries like a frigging squirrel—”
His eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped sideways, his forehead thumping against the arm of his prisoner’s chair. He fell to the floor on his side and then staggered to his feet, stumbling blindly toward the shell of a kitchen, trying desperately to maintain consciousness as a vivid image invaded his skull. It was a vision similar to the ones he had been cursed with his entire life but much, much stronger.
More lifelike.
More real.
A young woman and a man roughly the same age sat at a table in the kitchen of a small house talking with an older woman. The house was near here but not too near; it was definitely farther away than was typical for his visions. He knew this because through the kitchen window he could see none of the tall buildings or warehouses or city hustle and bustle that he should see at any location in Boston. The scene was more pastoral; still bleak and run-down, as if the area—wherever it was—had seen its best days decades ago and had been sinking into a state of neglect ever since.
At the table, the conversation revolved around a painful shared personal history. The two women were related. They were discussing details of a baby given up for adoption. The younger woman was the baby and the older woman her mother. The younger woman was asking questions; she could not understand why she had been abandoned so long ago.
Milo chuckled, lost in the vision blasting through his head. He leaned against the wall in a state of semi-consciousness. He could tell the young woman a thing or two about abandonment and loss. The older woman struggled to explain her rationale for giving up her child but the daughter seemed skeptical of the explanation.
As he watched the scene unfold, Milo felt a sense of rage begin to envelop him, a blackness of spirit much stronger even than he normally felt. He wouldn’t have imagined it possible. The sensation was directed at the young woman. He wanted to reach through the vision and strangle the stupid little bitch with his bare hands, to choke the life out of her and cut her up into tiny slivers of bone and flesh and then throw the pieces around the room.
He hated her.
He more than hated her. He wanted to destroy her.
The vision wavered in his mind and then faded as his rage increased, becoming all-encompassing. He could no longer make out the conversation at the table, not that he cared. All he wanted was to get at the young woman, to make her suffer. It wasn’t a sexual thing or even a power thing, like the sensation he felt toward Rae Ann and the other girls he had tortured and killed over the years. This was something deeper, more elemental, originating in the depths of his soulless existence. The intensity was frightening, even to Milo Cain, who had long ago reached the conclusion he was incapable of feeling anything.
Then the vision was gone, disappearing from his skull as quickly and unexpectedly as it had come. Milo moaned and dropped to his knees. His head ached uncomfortably and he could feel an egg rising on his forehead where it had impacted the chair. He looked across the room to see Rae Ann staring back at him fearfully. He ignored her.
He was confused and even a little scared. This was a vision totally different than anything he had ever experienced. In the normal ones, he observed random slices of other people’s lives, scenes with no emotions or value judgments attached to them. He had no feelings about them, they just were.
But in this vision, Milo had wanted nothing more than to destroy the young woman, to rip and rend and kill. And it was just the younger woman. The other two people who had appeared in the vision he couldn’t give a shit less about. He walked unsteadily in
to the bathroom, leaning over the hole where the toilet used to be, feeling like he was going to puke, but nothing came up. He rested his head lightly on the dirty floor.
Finally he stood again, exhausted. He had been extremely lucky in one way. If the vision had invaded—and that’s exactly what it felt like, an invasion—his brain a couple of minutes earlier, while his guest had been alone in the bathroom, she might have been able to rush past him and out the door as he struggled to avoid blacking out. She could have been down the stairs in seconds, screaming at the top of her lungs as soon as she hit the street. Even in this neighborhood, that scenario would have spelled the end for Milo Cain.
He looked at the bathroom wall, bare where a mirror used to be. Instead of his face staring back at him, Milo saw faded plaster with a hairline crack spidering diagonally toward the ceiling. That was probably for the best. He doubted he was looking too steady at the moment. He certainly didn’t feel steady.
Milo straightened slowly and returned to the living room. Rae Ann was watching him closely, the terror written on her features even more intensely now than at any time since he had brought her here.
Milo didn’t care. He continued to ignore her for the time being. She wasn’t going anywhere. He dragged himself to his air mattress and tumbled onto it. He was exhausted. He fell asleep and didn’t dream.
19
Cait’s question hung in the air like an accusation. She supposed it probably was. Of all the things she had expected to hear from the woman who gave her up in an illegal adoption three decades ago, “You have a twin” had never even entered her mind. Yet there it was.
For a brief moment, she thought maybe she hadn’t heard the woman correctly. Maybe her mother had said something like, “Separating you from us was a sin,” not, “We had to separate you from your twin.”
But that was patently ridiculous. The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop, and Virginia Ayers was sitting less than three feet away at the same table. Of course she had heard her mother correctly.
“I have a twin?” she repeated for the third time.
The woman sighed deeply, the sound filled with longing and regret and, it seemed to Cait, perhaps a touch of fear.
“This is a mistake,” Virginia said, but before Cait could say a word in response, she disregarded her own statement and began telling the story Cait had waited her entire life to hear.
“As you’ve undoubtedly concluded, your family history is more than a little unusual. And yes,” she added hastily, sensing Cait’s impatience, “you heard me correctly. You have a twin. A brother, actually. He was born minutes after you.”
“A brother,” Cait said wonderingly. “Where is he?”
Virginia shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You gave him up, too? Why in God’s name would you do that?”
Tears welled in Virginia’s eyes and Kevin laid his hand gently on Cait’s arm. “Maybe you should let her tell the story in her own way,” he suggested. “I’m sure she’ll get to that when she’s ready.”
Cait looked the distraught woman in the eyes and she nodded gratefully. “Thank you,” she said.
She took a shuddering breath and continued. “Incidences of twin births run throughout our family’s genealogy, as far back as can be traced. Lots of twins, twins born roughly two of every three generations; a statistically impossible number of twins. For many families, twin births are a burden due to the fact that they require twice as much food, twice as much clothing, twice as much attention, twice as much of everything. For a young family without a lot of money, having twins can be stressful and difficult—”
“You gave up your children because it might be difficult?” Cait interrupted. Kevin stroked her arm and she closed her mouth reluctantly. She could feel her face flush and her mouth was set in an angry line.
“No,” Virginia answered simply. “That’s not why we gave you up. I mention these issues as examples of the many problems faced by the typical family with twins. To provide a little perspective. For your father and me, the problem was a far different one.” She gazed into Cait’s eyes and Cait felt her mother reaching into her very soul.
“You can sense things, see things in your mind, can’t you?” Virginia asked suddenly, changing the subject, catching Cait off guard.
She blinked in surprise. “How—how did you know?”
“I know because I have the same gift. Or the same curse, depending upon how you look at it. I know because this gift, or this curse, has been passed down through our ancestry for generations. For hundreds of years, maybe thousands.
“If this gift is similar to my own—and I have no doubt it is—you receive occasional flashes of insight into the lives of the people around you, often trivial, meaningless things, always at random and always in the form of mental pictures or images.” She paused and looked at Cait, waiting for confirmation.
For a moment Cait simply stared, unable to speak, shocked into silence at the turn the conversation had taken. Then she nodded.
Virginia nodded back absently, lost in her thoughts, and continued. “You’ve been able to do this little parlor trick since your earliest days, it’s a part of your personality that you once questioned but have long since learned to live with. You usually ignore the mental pictures—”
“Flickers,” Cait interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“Those mental pictures. I call them Flickers.”
“Flickers,” Virginia responded, pronouncing the word slowly, trying it out, rolling it around on her tongue, savoring it like a coffee aficionado might savor a particularly flavorful sip of dark roast. “I like it. It fits. Anyway, as I was saying, you usually ignore these ‘Flickers,’ as most of the time they mean nothing. Occasionally, however, you will receive a Flicker of significance. When that happens, you will attempt to put the mental image to use to help someone, to do a good deed, the clairvoyant’s version of helping an old lady across the street.”
Cait nodded again, unconsciously this time, as she flashed back to the elderly woman at the grocery store who had dropped her checkbook on her kitchen floor. She looked up to see Virginia Ayers—her mother—watching her with a tiny smile on her face. The smile seemed out of place; the rest of her face looked as though she might break into tears again at any moment.
“I’ve always been curious about my ability,” Cait said, “about whether it was a genetic thing or if I was just some weird freak of nature. But you’re right about one thing: for the most part, I don’t give the Flickers a whole lot of thought anymore.”
“Now that you know you are not alone, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that your twin brother possesses the same ability. He also receives these Flickers, as you call them.”
“How do you know that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if you gave my brother and me up as newborns, how could you possibly know he has the ability as well? Have you been keeping track of him? Do you know where he is? Can I see him?”
Virginia shook her head firmly. “No, honey, it’s nothing like that. Your father and I did surrender both of you as infants. You were only hours old when you disappeared out of our lives forever. Or so I thought, until I heard from that private detective down in Tampa.”
“Then, how? How do you know?”
“Because that’s the way it works with twins in this bloodline. It’s the root of the whole problem. There is no doubt that your brother had—has—the same ability as you. It’s why we had no choice but to give you up in an illegal adoption, surrendering you to a group that promised to place the two of you as far apart geographically as possible. It was the only way we could think of to keep you safe, to give you any chance of having a normal life. Or a life, period.”
Cait shrugged, bewildered. “We had to be taken from our parents and placed hundreds, maybe thousands of miles apart simply because we both had the ability to receive Flickers? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
&nbs
p; “It doesn’t make sense because you don’t know the whole story.”
“Then tell me the whole story.”
Virginia stared at the surface of the small table and took a delicate sip of tea. Cait’s tea sat in front of her, forgotten.
Finally the older woman shook her head, a tiny movement filled with resignation and defeat. “I suppose there’s no stopping you. As you said yourself, the genie is out of the bottle now, isn’t it?”
“If you’re asking whether I plan to forget about the fact that I have a twin brother and stop digging into this family’s supposedly mysterious past, if that’s what you’re asking, then no, there’s no stopping me.”
“I didn’t think so,” Virginia said, and placed her teacup onto the table with a clatter. Cait looked down and saw the woman’s hand shaking as if palsied. She tried to recall if it had been doing that earlier and could not. “Then I suppose there’s not much point beating around the bush.”
“None.”
“All right. We gave up our only children in an illegal adoption as the only means of protecting you from your twin brother. Had we not done so, you would be long dead by now. He would have murdered you years ago.”
20
Milo awoke from his nap feeling groggy, tossing and turning on his air mattress before finally abandoning the idea of sleep and rising bleary-eyed and exhausted. It had been a couple of hours since the disturbingly strong vision of…whatever the hell it had been…had knocked him on his ass like never before.
He sat up, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, and glanced toward the middle of the room where his terrified houseguest remained securely fastened to her chair. From this angle Milo couldn’t be sure, but the hooker appeared to be dozing. Her head tilted forward as if her chin was resting on her breastbone and she sat unmoving.
He rolled off the mattress and stood, and Rae Ann snapped awake at the sound of the old floorboards creaking underfoot. She shook her head once as if to clear the cobwebs and then looked around, obviously trying to locate her captor.
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