Milo smiled. “I’m behind you,” he said playfully, “so you can’t see me.” She whimpered into her duct-tape gag and he stepped into her field of view.
The entire day’s schedule had been thrown off by the earlier unplanned interruption, that disturbingly strong vision of the three people sitting around a kitchen table. He stretched, trying to choose between eating breakfast—it was so late now, he supposed, that it could more appropriately be described as lunch—or getting on with the day’s entertainment.
Entertainment won out. Sure, he was hungry, but he could eat anytime. His chances to play with a fresh victim were distressingly infrequent. He gazed down at the schoolgirl hooker appraisingly and saw her staring back at him with eyes wide and fearful. In the harsh light of midday, after the first round of play last night and without an opportunity to shower or apply makeup, the girl didn’t look quite so youthful after all—certainly not an age to justify her ridiculous outfit. Streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks like tiny canals and traces of crow’s feet were beginning to radiate outward from her blue eyes.
Milo didn’t care. She was still relatively young and sexy and, best of all, she was his. His to use in the manner of his choosing for as long as he elected to do so, before tossing her corpse into a Dumpster when the pleasure he received from torturing her was no longer worth the effort of keeping her alive. He smiled and instantly the girl began thrashing about in her chair, her efforts pointless but enthusiastic, somehow apparently tipped off to his intentions solely by the look in his eyes.
He watched her struggle, aroused by her reaction, his predator eyes locked onto her body, determined not to miss a moment of the fun. Eventually she tired and slumped back, her slim form shaking either from exertion or fear. Milo wasn’t sure which and didn’t care. She had graduated from whimpering to moaning, the sounds still muffled by the thick silver duct tape layered over her mouth. He wished he could remove the gag to fully enjoy her terror, but unfortunately, even in this neighborhood, the screams she would immediately unleash would not go unnoticed.
It was a damned shame. Furthermore, it was completely unfair. Milo had found her and lured her here fair and square; he should be permitted the luxury of enjoying her in whatever manner he pleased. He sighed deeply. Someday he would get his own home way out in the country, a place with no pesky neighbors, a place where not only could he play with his victims without having to gag them, he could hook them up to a loudspeaker if he wanted to and still not have to worry.
In the meantime, he would make do with what he had. No one ever said life would be easy.
Or fair.
Now, on to the business at hand. How did he want to play today? He fingered the pliers in his pocket and came to a quick decision. It wasn’t all that difficult. “What do you say we take a look at those fingers you injured last night? Maybe I can fix them up for you.”
“Mmmph mmmph mmmph mmmmmph,” Rae Ann replied, resuming her impressive routine of head-shaking and body-thrashing. It occurred to Milo that his little deception had not fooled her. She knew she was in for pain. There just wasn’t anything she could do about it.
He displayed his pliers for her with a flourish, holding them in front of her eyes, which she had squeezed tightly shut as though she might be able to make the whole nightmare disappear. Eventually, though, Milo knew she would become curious and reopen them, and eventually she did. The terror in them blossomed at the sight of the small hand tool.
The pliers seemed relatively benign to Milo, grey steel pincers with curved handles covered in red rubberized plastic for a firm grip. Rae Ann didn’t see them as benign, though, probably thanks to her slightly different perspective. She was clearly terrified.
In a quick motion, he fell to his knees in front of his guest. To anyone entering the shabby apartment at that exact moment, he might have looked like a nervous suitor proposing marriage to his young girlfriend. Except, of course, that the bride-to-be had been duct-taped to her chair and blood was dripping steadily from three ruined fingers.
But no one walked into the apartment. Milo reached forward, grabbing Rae Ann’s badly injured right hand with his left, holding it steady, waiting patiently for her to calm down.
She never did, and when he got tired of waiting, Milo opened the jaws of the pliers as widely as he could, placed the tempered steel between the first and second knuckles of her swollen pinky finger, and deftly twisted his wrist, snapping the delicate bone with an audible and satisfying Crack! She screamed in agony, the sound muffled almost to the point of inaudibility. Milo removed the pliers and the tip of the finger tilted at nearly a ninety-degree angle, pointing toward the floor, blood dripping more steadily now onto the makeshift plastic tarp.
Rae Ann continued to scream into her gag; she was panting and hyperventilating, and Milo came in his pants without even touching himself. He never tired of the sexual gratification he received from the suffering of his guests. He knew this made him different from most, but was bothered by that fact only inasmuch as it wasn’t always easy to avail himself of a young girl to torture. And now that he had one, he certainly wasn’t about to let her go to waste.
After maybe thirty seconds of what must have been some of the most intense pain the young woman had ever endured—although it was nothing compared to what Milo had in store for her—Rae Ann passed out, her head slumping to the side, her face streaked with tears and snot and drool. It was disgusting
Milo didn’t care. He rose from the floor and went into the bathroom to clean himself up with a dirty towel.
The girl was still unconscious when he came out of the bathroom, so Milo sat on the floor with his back against the wall, watching her and thinking about nothing in particular while waiting for her to wake up so they could have more fun together. She looked so peaceful, nothing like the panicked animal she had been prior to blacking out.
His mind wandered back to the mysterious vision he had experienced earlier in the morning. He was certain he had never seen the young woman from that vision before and wondered why she had inspired such a vile, hate-filled reaction, the intensity of which still surprised and troubled him. As an antisocial personality, undoubtedly diagnosable as a sociopath—Milo Cain had issues with mental stability, he knew that, but he wasn’t stupid—he was used to viewing the world through a lens of anger and mistrust, but his reaction to the girl in the vision had been off the charts, even for him.
What did that mean? Even now, sitting here recalling the vision, he could feel the hate bubbling up inside him like a rapidly filling well, causing his pulse to race and his breathing to quicken. Even now, hours later, the mere thought of the bitch—it was only the young woman, the other two people in the room inspired nothing more in him than his usual disgust and loathing—caused a blackness to fill his already-corrupted soul and thoughts of murder and mayhem to swell in his consciousness, almost to the exclusion of everything else.
The girl in the vision was young and pretty, roughly his own age, and she radiated goodness and decency, two things he hated, despite the fact he wished he could have them. But it was more than that. There were plenty of people, even in his shabby orbit, who were good and decent and who didn’t make him feel as though he wanted to rip them apart with his bare hands, who didn’t inspire this single-minded desire to rend and destroy and kill.
In the vision, the girl had been discussing her heritage, mostly listening while the older woman held court, occasionally asking questions, occasionally displaying flashes of anger. It was righteous anger, Milo could tell, and that was another thing that pissed him off. Who the hell did she think she was, the goddamned righteous beautiful bitch?
Another wave of bilious rage swept over him and he went with it, closing his eyes and envisioning what he would do if (when) he ever caught up with her. He would hurt her, he would torture her, he would make her wish she had never been born, he would do things to her that would make this pliers activity with Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker seem like child’s play, like Ar
ts and Crafts time for a preschooler.
Milo realized his eyes were screwed tightly shut and water was leaking from them. He was crying like a fucking baby while picturing all of the things he would do to the unknown and unnamed girl from his vision. He sniffled and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and realized he needed to blow his nose.
That realization made him think of his houseguest and her snot-covered face. He was going to have to clean her up before he could play with her again. He glanced across the room and saw that she had awakened and was watching him. Her eyes were filled with the fear he had come to expect, as well as with the terrible pain that must be radiating outward from her yanked-out fingernails and especially from her broken, mangled pinky finger.
But there was something else as well, Milo thought. In her eyes a hint of laughter shone through, a hidden smile, a mocking contempt for the weakness she had caught him displaying. It was like the time his mother had caught him jerking off in bed when he was twelve. She had been shocked and angry, there was no doubt about that, but Milo had also glimpsed the same barely masked contempt he was seeing here.
There had been nothing he could do back then. He was twelve and his mother was…well...something, he wasn’t really sure how old she was, but she had been a hell of a lot older than he, and had held all the power along with his asshole father.
That was not the case now, though. Milo Cain was in charge now, and if this Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker bitch thought she could get away with mocking him, he would make good and goddamn certain she would never make that error in judgment again.
He rose to his feet with renewed vigor. As much as he was going to enjoy the upcoming session with Rae Ann, it would now have a little added meaning thanks to her arrogant disregard of the power structure in their burgeoning relationship. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his trusty pliers, snap, snap, snapping them absently as he approached her chair.
21
Cait stared at her mother, again rendered speechless by a statement that had taken her completely by surprise. She realized her mouth was hanging open and she closed it. “I must not have heard you correctly. I thought you said my twin brother would have murdered me by now if we had grown up together.”
“You heard me,” Virginia countered. Now that she had come out with the words that had obviously been eating away at her, she seemed calmer, more in control of herself and her emotions.
Cait, on the other hand, felt much less so. She stood suddenly, her calves shoving the wooden chair back on the ancient floor with a loud squeal. She began pacing in the tiny kitchen. Kevin started to rise and she motioned him back down in his seat.
“I have to tell you,” Cait said, choosing her words carefully. “If you thought that statement was somehow going to clear everything up, to answer all of my questions, you were very much mistaken. Why would my own brother—my own twin!—murder me? What possible reason would he have? And furthermore, how can you say such a thing when you only knew us for a couple of hours years ago? When we were only infants?”
Virginia seemed unruffled by the outburst. “You remember what I told you about the frequency of twin births occurring throughout this family’s history, and how it is a statistical impossibility?”
Cait nodded, saying nothing.
“Well, in every instance of twin births into this bloodline—and when I say ‘every instance,’ I’m talking about a history going back hundreds of years—one of the twins has wound up dead at the hands of the other. Every single instance. Bar none.”
Nobody moved and the kitchen was silent.
“What? Why? How is that possible?” The questions sounded hopelessly insufficient to Cait as she asked them. She trudged back to her chair and sat, stunned and confused.
“I believe, and your father believed as well, that the cause of this tragic history is related directly to the quirk of genetics that allows you to see the flashes—Flickers, as you call them—into the lives of others. When a single child is born with the gift, as I was, for example, the normal notions of right and wrong—what we know as ‘conscience,’ for lack of a better term—are as fully developed as they would be with any other human being. This is important, because it means that each time I, for example, receive a Flicker, there is no natural inclination to use the information gained from the vision in a destructive way.”
“You make a choice to behave in an acceptable manner.”
“Exactly. It’s like walking into a candy store and seeing no one behind the counter, but all the candy is placed out in the open where it is easily accessible. You are faced with the choice of doing the right thing or the wrong thing—waiting for the proprietor and paying for the candy, or shoving it into your pocket and leaving the store.”
“I understand the concept of conscience and choosing to do the right thing,” Cait said, realizing she sounded harsher than she intended but not caring. “I just don’t see what all this has to do with twins and the ability to receive Flickers.”
“I’m getting to that,” Virginia said patiently. “So you agree that we all face situations in our lives where we must choose between right and wrong?”
“Of course,” Cait replied with a shrug. “We face those choices daily, both large and small.”
Virginia nodded. “Yes, we do. Now, let me ask you a question. Can you ever recall a time in your life when you received a Flicker and were tempted to use the information you received in a destructive way? With malicious intent?”
“Well, often the Flicker is pretty nonspecific. A lot of the time, the information isn’t anything that could be used for good or bad.”
“Understood. But there are times when the opposite is true, and you see things in your head that could be used either in a positive or a negative way, correct?”
“Of course.”
“Well, in those instances, have you ever been tempted, even a little bit, to use the Flicker in a negative way, to turn the information to your advantage somehow?”
“Of course not!” Cait flushed and drew her head back as if she had been slapped. “That would be wrong!”
Virginia smiled. “It’s never occurred to you that even though you face the same struggles with right and wrong—good and evil, so to speak—as everyone else in the world, every day, you’ve never once had to do the same thing with a Flicker?”
Cait furrowed her brow, her indignant reaction of a moment ago suddenly forgotten. She was silent for a long moment. “I—I guess I’ve never thought about it in that way.”
“Of course you haven’t, dear, because doing the right thing when you receive a Flicker is the most natural thing in the world to you. It’s like breathing, or blinking. When was the last time you gave either one of those things a conscious thought?”
“Never.”
“Exactly. And that’s my point. It goes against your very nature to use a Flicker negatively or destructively.” Virginia stopped talking and Cait sat unmoving, absorbing this strange revelation. Kevin sat next to her, saying nothing, spellbound by the entire bizarre conversation.
“Then my twin brother…” Cait’s voice drifted off as she digested the implications of what she had just learned. A sense of dawning horror wormed through her.
“That’s right, your twin—in this case it’s a brother, by the way, but it didn’t necessarily have to be, you could just as easily have been born the same sex—has undoubtedly been receiving Flickers his entire life, just like you. But in his case, the natural reaction is to misuse the information he receives. Seeking a negative, destructive outcome with Flickers comes as naturally to him as taking a positive path does to you.”
Cait sat back in her chair, thunderstruck. She felt like Alice after falling through the rabbit hole. Suddenly reality was warped and reflected in ways she would never have imagined just an hour ago. It was like looking at life through a fun house mirror.
“But…why?”
“Well, as I said before—and keep in mind, this is only conjecture, the b
est theory your father and I could come up with after spending months thinking about it once we discovered I was pregnant with twins—we theorized this dichotomy is somehow related to whatever psychic ability we possess that allows us to receive these Flickers. Or maybe everyone has the ability, but the average person is unaware of it. In any event, your father and I guessed that this psychic ability must be somehow incompatible with twin fetuses as they develop in the womb, that the sense of morality that accompanies the deciphering of Flickers cannot be split. Thus—”
“One of the twins reacts to Flickers as good and one as evil,” Cait interrupted, so caught up in following her mother’s chain of logic that she was unable to stop herself from blurting it out.
“That’s the conclusion we came to.”
“But it still doesn’t explain why one twin would murder the other.”
Virginia smiled. “You’re quite the sharp cookie.”
Cait said nothing, concentrating on trying to puzzle out the mystery.
“Now we’ve descended into a realm so far removed from normal behavior patterns that it becomes difficult even to hazard a guess, but the best theory we could come up with is that the psychic ability that allows us to receive Flickers is similar in some strange way to the positive and negative polarity of a magnet. If you place the two oppositely polarized sides of a magnet together, they cling to one another, but if you place the two similarly polarized sides together, they reject one another, making it impossible for them to occupy the same space.”
“You’re saying I’m the same as some maniac who wants to kill me.”
“Only in the sense that you have the same psychic ability, an ability containing a moral component that is impossible to split equally, so one side—the good—receives the morality gene, if you will, while the other side—the evil—gets, unfortunately, passed over. Through no fault of his own.”
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