by Truddi Chase
Something awful occurred to Twelve. She had to ask because what she was receiving from this person who had replaced the Outrider was so peculiar, so all encompassing, so terribly without end, without beginning.
Are you what they call god?
No, darlin’. The brogue was rich and the smile had widened to its fullest point. Believe as y’ will, but god, if he be a’tal, is not a single, far-off entity teachin’ through fear those less than he be. There is nothin’ t’ teach. The knowledge is already inside each man on earth, merely waitin’ t’ be tapped.
Are you that knowledge?
Aye. Some say that it is so.
My god, said Twelve. What an enormous ego you have.
Aye. This is true. But I am no more than every man himself possesses. Therefore, I do not strut my ego. I merely use it.
* * *
Anne Dun from Protective Services, who accompanied Stanley, had a very nice but worn smile and soft brown eyes.
“It’s very nice of you to do this,” she said.
“I don’t mind,” the woman told her. She felt curiously adolescent, unperturbed, studying the precinct house. Captain Albert Johnson’s domain was neat as a pin and the floors, big black and white linoleum squares, glowed with wax.
“If Stanley’s videotape hadn’t been so full of static, you could be home right now. If these police officers don’t seem to be listening, don’t take offense. They never listen. They answer phones, spit on the floor, and sleep during these presentations, but they seldom listen.”
Stanley walked on the woman’s right, Anne Dun on her left. The room they went into was huge, with row after row of desks, and just as neat as the outside hallway. The men and women in uniform were neat, too. The woman felt it again, that curious adolescent bravado . . . the urge to giggle. Stanley’s tape recorder got plugged in right away and he sat down next to her. The woman hated her own chair but had no choice.
Anne Dun didn’t wait for silence to introduce them. Stanley was known by practically every officer in the room. The woman was not. After Stanley’s brief remarks, she began to speak. Then that twelve-year-old feeling got very strong. There were times when her voice broke, times when the words seemed to tumble over each other. There was also the feeling of being removed. After a while, the collar of her blouse lay against her throat, sopping wet. In the back of the room, an officer felt the hair on the back of his neck rising.
“You ever heard a rabbit die?” he asked his partner. “The sound she’s making. That’s it.”
For an hour and fifteen minutes, there had not been a sound from any officer in the room. If anyone had spit on the floor, Anne Dun had not noticed.
The woman looked up to find an officer standing in front of her. His hair was snow white and his uniform crisp and straining against his chest. “Captain Albert Johnson,” he said. “Friend of Stanley’s. I always wondered, lady, why some people had to go through shit. Now I know. You gave me more today than I ever wanted to have, but I’ll use it. You got guts.”
“That,” said Anne Dun at the woman’s elbow, “was high praise.”
Stanley smiled to himself. After today, all of Albert’s officers not only knew for sure that two-year-olds could be raped, they knew exactly what the experience was like.
* * *
The woman went out to dinner that night, perplexed over what Anne Dun had said about the videotape. She would have to remember to ask Stanley why the tape had been scratchy. When she recorded notes at home, they were full of static. Even brand-new batteries and then a new tape recorder hadn’t helped.
She stood just inside the restaurant door until the owner spotted her and led her to Morgan’s table.
“You really didn’t recognise my voice on the phone.”
Morgan smelled of an exotic, male cologne. The sounds in the restaurant were muted, the lighting subdued, and the woman did not reply immediately. She was watching the blurred and shifting reflections of him in cutlery and crystal. Her mind shifted too, not a jarring motion, but rather like a car changing gears, smooth—except that she felt it strongly and wondered why it was happening.
Morgan waited for an answer. Under the table his knee pressed against hers; the Outrider smiled and pressed back.
“We speak to so many people on the phone all day long,” she said, “that I have a tendency to become confused.”
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
“Terribly. Your eyes are beautiful.”
The Outrider spoke the words. The woman heard them and marvelled at the audacity. A sinking sensation ballooned inside and Morgan gradually came into better focus. During the last part of Morgan’s phone call tonight, the sinking sensation had begun as she bathed hurriedly with uncommon euphoria, wondering at the transformation of her face. The excitement of feeling beautiful was now at peak force.
Dessert arrived. Orange peel held aloft by a serious waiter was drizzled with brandy and set afire. Spoon by spoon, mouthfuls of incredibly tangy-tart, bitter-sweet coolness, quivered down Catherine’s throat. Catherine never surfaced in the Outrider’s slum bars. But this was the elegant black and white decor, the mirrored walls and magnificent ambience of “Churchill’s,” and well worth Catherine’s time.
From a great distance the woman assumed that both the sensation of feeling beautiful and the words were her own. How much there was to say to Morgan on diverse subjects and how erudite she’d become!
Overnight, as it were.
The Outrider was making a joke but now the woman believed she had a sense of humour, too.
Later, in Morgan’s apartment, the thousand startled reflections in the mirrored walls of the bathroom were unfamiliar to the woman. Again, there came a slight shifting and gradually, as if someone poured recognition into her brain, the room didn’t seem strange at all. The voices were starting, though.
To hell with it, Nails said. We survived before being dependent on Stanley and will again.
The woman turned on the hot-water faucet and began scrubbing her hands, hearing vaguely thoughts from a source she could not define.
I don’t want to just “survive” any more. The voice of a twelve-year-old girl came from too far away and she sounded sad. Besides, how much longer do we have before we start throwing things at Morgan and eventually drive him away?
Lady Catherine Tissieu was appalled at the thought of anyone throwing anything at Morgan. Her nose went into the air. Who would dare?
We would. The Outrider grinned. She directed her words to no one in particular. Every time we get into a relationship you think: It won’t happen this time. This time I’ll be good. But all it takes to start one of us ranting is the right word: family, church, religion, love—and somebody trying to force those things on us. Or the expressions “You will,” “You should,” “You must.” That’s all. Never learn, do you?
Shut up. Bickering, bored Nails.
Morgan had the brandy poured and a hand of cards dealt when she came out of the bathroom, smelling soapy and looking damp. A game now and then relaxed him after a hectic day of dealing with his investors and their banks and everybody’s idiosyncrasies. She was a strange card player. At times he doubted if she knew the difference between a three of clubs and the ace of spades because occasionally she still asked him, in a childlike voice. It had taken him eight games to teach her the intricacies of gin rummy. After that, she’d refused his instruction, insisting that she wanted to play it her own way. Since then, he’d lost regularly. What he didn’t know was that while she wouldn’t dream of cheating him, winning meant a lot to her and so she was employing a rather strong method.
The cards Morgan held were irrelevant—she concentrated on her own and what she needed to win. She did not understand how her “method” worked, nor did she truly believe that winning stemmed from that method. Had she been aware of it, she would have accepted even less, how little of the “method” was her own doing. All she
knew was that she could stay his hand from the row of discards and direct it back to the face-down deck, so often that it amazed her. She could “visualise” whatever card she wanted him to throw; visualise it so often that it made her laugh.
He wound up, each time, fuming and incredulous at her “luck” and stung by the smile she’d give him while tallying the score.
“How do you know that?” he asked, keeping the edge from his voice.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Or maybe I do but you wouldn’t believe it.”
“How much do I owe you?” Morgan ignored her statement because it was oblique and he didn’t want to pursue it. Losing for the fourth time that night had irritated him more than he could admit.
“Can we take it out in trade?”
Morgan discovered that she was looking at him with the expression he’d found so disconcerting at dinner. It hadn’t been what he expected of a woman in a public restaurant. But then she’d been a chain of surprises during the meal, drifting from the slightly puzzled, uncertain woman who sat down to dinner with him, to a witty conversationalist who moved with ease from reserved and rather dense, to sophisticated and urbane—to what he could only term “lewd”—the same look he was getting now.
He thought there had been other changes during the meal and the ride home, yet they’d been so subtle he couldn’t be sure. How long had he known her now? This was probably the most time they’d ever spent together. All he was certain of at the moment was the narrow, slitted look she threw him over her shoulder as she headed for the bedroom. He followed.
After a very long while, the woman became aware that Morgan sounded like a balloon with a slow leak. His body had sunk gradually onto her own. She rolled to one side.
She could not ever recall studying a man’s buttocks this way, revelling in the artistry of their contour. Morgan himself had been frightening from the first time she’d found herself in bed with him—a blank spot nagged her; she couldn’t get past it. She started turning their relationship around, as if trying to find meaning in it, and find herself, too. All she found was the silence of the quiet, high-rise apartment and the navy blue sheets beneath her. She did not understand that for her, there hadn’t been any more. Then or now.
The Buffer moved over completely. Ten-Four lay on the bed and counted her gains. By observing Morgan in action, her methods of negotiating had improved to the point where it astounded even herself. Ten-Four found Morgan’s brain fascinating. She wanted to snatch his mind from him and graft it onto her own.
Catherine, meanwhile, sighed in satisfaction. Morgan’s bone structure, the way the flesh lay over those bones, intrigued both her artistic and practical sense. Morgan, Catherine had decided months ago, was no mere pretender to power. She’d gravitated to him from that point on, because something told her that she was very much like him, and that Morgan was therefore no threat whatever. He might have been if she’d desired marriage, but Catherine believed that marriage was a wasteland where a woman’s mind was put on simmer until she gathered up her brains and finally divorced. What Catherine had wanted from Morgan was a man who looked marvelous in public, a little romance, a little ambiance—and to learn the skill of convincing people that she was invincible.
Invincible. Power. The words entered the woman’s mind as the Buffer moved back in. The mother had had power over her a long time ago. Stanley hinted that she still did.
Yes, said a distant, younger voice than her own—mother. “I’ve got to teach you right from wrong. Pay attention: nice girls don’t wear shorts, look at boys, think about sex, read bad books. They don’t kiss, hug, touch boys on dates. Don’t ever let a boy touch you, they only want one thing. Do you hear me?”
I heard her, the voice went on. “I’m your mother, you belong to me, you owe me the breath of life, you owe me everything.”
Bull, Nails said. Nobody believed any of that garbage.
If nobody believed it, the Outrider grinned, why did the fright keep growing? Why are we so mistrustful of all people and why weren’t some of us, tonight, conscious of the sex act?
[Stanley would ask months later how it was possible for the Troops not to know of each other’s existence all these years when obviously they could, at times, talk to each other. The Interpreter would tell him that the Troop members had been speaking but not to each other. “It’s a matter of thought transference, Stanley. We could hear each other’s thoughts sometimes and didn’t know where they were coming from. The woman, when she could hear them, simply believed they were her own.”]
The woman wanted to get up from the bed and go to the bathroom, but an odd force pinned her next to Morgan. The voices became relentless. Somehow, one of them was directed at her.
Yes, this is a relationship. Morgan doesn’t know how strange it really is, and neither do you. For you, there isn’t any more.
The thoughts were in her mind, she had to be thinking them. Yet she knew that they never got inside her mind at all, were simply almost visible tonight, hanging outside some kind of peripheral sight that didn’t belong to her, either.
Hey. Think about it. Morgan’s strength lies within himself, not in his being strong enough to take something away from you. What is it that Morgan doesn’t do, that makes you feel safe with him? It should be so obvious. What is it that makes Morgan so unlike the stepfather?
The woman’s throat closed, the room seemed to tilt. Morgan reached out and pulled her closer. Staring at him in the semi-darkness, she felt something wet on her cheeks and tasted it. It was salty.
EIGHT
IN Howard Johnson’s, Ten-Four took a booth because the counter was crowded and she liked sitting alone. The breakfast she ordered was huge and appropriate. Within the hour she’d be walking lots, a term used by land brokers, meaning that you put on boots, gathered up the profit figures, and drove to the site. Usually the builder or the developer met you there and eyeballed the land from his truck. After making certain that you had spent weeks putting it together, he ignored the data. He either fell in love with the tract at first glance or he didn’t.
Ten-Four had been the one to decide, after the required three-year stint as an agent, to open a company devoted to land and commercial real estate. She revelled in strolling an untouched piece of ground, of matching it up with the right buyer.
Today she was meeting one of the toughest builders in the metropolitan area. He might be cranky and eccentric, but he knew raw land and he called her the “land hawk.”
The woman sat, fork poised over a plate of eggs, as Ten-Four’s thoughts leaked into her mind. On her own, without Ten-Four “leaking through,” the woman had no concept of real estate. For one peculiar instant, she compared her vast stretch of relatively empty mind—with what had to be someone else’s very full mind.
She laid down the fork because her hand shook, and carefully removed the red journal from her purse. Red was hateful, a reminder of something unpleasant—she couldn’t recall what. But she supposed that red did make the journal easier to find among the purse’s scrambled contents. So many things got lost. Sometimes lost articles reappeared in strange places, sometimes she never saw them again.
She struggled to write down what she had just experienced, but sensed that another mind, not Ten-Four’s this time, was doing the thinking and figuring for her—and that this wasn’t the first time. Could that be? And was that her question or someone else’s? For one tiny moment, the woman knew she wasn’t a broker. What was she?
A humming began in her head, so strange, that she only wanted to get outside in the air, fast. She attacked her food quickly, because leaving food on one’s plate had always made the mother angry. Why didn’t the food she had just put into her mouth create a full sensation?
“For you, there isn’t any more . . .,” the phrase she’d heard last night in the bedroom with Morgan, and denied so quickly, came back, as if in answer to her silent question. She faced the words. Somehow, they were
related to the food and a lot more—to her life, to the relationship with Morgan, if that’s what it was. Other women wanted husbands and children, someone to love them through life’s happiness and trauma. What did she want? Nothing and nobody. With a mind so empty, and being constantly scared, nobody could want her.
The voice came as she paid the check and again as she got into the car: For you, there isn’t any more. The phrase couldn’t mean anything, but hearing voices had to mean she was crazy. One of these days, if she hadn’t already, she would fall to pieces.
The humming inside her head increased; she drove and a shower of flicks began: tiny glimpses of the farm—trees, grass, the coolness of lemonade on a hot summer day, a fragment of someone’s naked flesh, the smell of the stepfather’s hot, sweaty body.
She needed to stay calm for the meeting. The builder was probably standing on the lots right now, impatient and angry. The car radio blared Fleetwood Mac’s “Sarah,” and the music scattered the flicks. The music wound itself around her mind; so did the knowledge that she wasn’t alone in the car.
Two unseen children were about to make the woman “acutely aware,” not of their ages, or physical characteristics, but rather their human emotions. The woman’s awareness grew stronger as the car neared the crossroad and turned toward the remote countryside. Composure fled as the unfamiliar term “flatbed car” shot out of nowhere. The presence beside her was as real as the music. It cried and wiped its nose with the back of its hand. Another presence wiped its eyes with the hem of the woman’s skirt.
She managed to determine that neither could be flesh and blood, but only the materialisation in the form of two unseen entities. The flicks had stopped whirling around like confetti. They’d merged, until a small but complete picture formed, of a flatbed car with rusted wheels and the wood of the body so old and weather-beaten that it must have been parked by the farm’s hedgerow for years. The two tiny presences in the car beside her were crying louder at the image of the flatbed car. They seemed so afraid of the dark place under it. The picture faded. [The woman would not remember it or connect it to anything in her past for months to come.]
