by Hamill, Ike
He was out of time. Brad’s voice sounded closer.
“Is that Gordie? Have you seen a young man named Robby?” Brad called.
“Shit,” Corinna whispered. She pulled on Robby’s shirt, turning him around and began to march him around the corner. Gordie pulled at the leash when he saw his friend. His wagging tail thumped at Robby’s leg.
“Stay there,” Corinna said, “or your friend is going to lose blood.”
Brad came around the corner of a van and stopped. His face looked concerned but hopeful.
“You okay?” Brad said. His eyes went to Robby’s shoulder.
Robby nodded.
“Put down any weapons you have,” Corinna said.
Brad put up his hands and turned to show her his back. “I don’t have any. Listen, I think shit is about to get dangerous. There’s this guy who calls himself The Origin, and…”
“Shut up,” Corinna said.
Her tone contained hostility and anger. Robby recognized something else in there as well. It was the way his mother had always sounded when she had too much information flying at her and not enough time to process.
Brad didn’t seem to understand. “This whole place is changing by the second. It might not be safe to hang around.”
“Brad, shut up,” Robby said.
Corinna’s grip tightened on his shoulder for a moment. At least the pressure of the blade diminished. Robby didn’t feel like he was going to be impaled at any second. There were a million things that Robby wanted to say. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to fit together for him. If he tried to help her reach the right conclusion, he would only drive her farther away from it. At least that’s the way it had always gone with his mother, and she seemed to have some of the same personality traits.
Brad was starting to lower his hands.
“What are you doing?” Corinna asked.
“Nothing,” Brad said. He shook his head and put his hands back up. “My arms are tired. I’m not used to driving a motorcycle. It’s hard on the arms.”
Robby wished that Brad would shut up.
Brad used one of his raised hands to scratch his ear.
“Did you guys see what’s going on with the Freedom Tower? There was a spire that shouldn’t have been there and then it was gone. And I thought I heard a swarm of bees.”
Robby couldn’t see Corinna’s face. She was pressing the blade to his back and still had a hand clamped on his shoulder. He could imagine that she was getting frustrated though. She was trying to think and Brad wouldn’t shut up.
“It couldn’t have been bees. The sound was way too loud,” Brad continued. “And, this is going to sound even crazier than the bees, but I swear I saw a big lizard a few minutes ago. Have you ever seen those Komodo dragons?”
Corinna lightly pushed Robby away. The point of the blade was removed from his back.
“The Origin is with Liam,” Corinna said to Brad. “Tell me what you know about him so I can kill him.”
Brad nodded and lowered his arms. He took a small step forward.
“I’ll tell you everything, but the bad news is that I don’t think you can kill him.”
CHAPTER 47: BOSTON
“WHO ARE YOU TALKING to?” The Origin asked.
Carrie opened her eyes.
“I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was sitting here, waiting to understand what I’m supposed to do next.”
His slow eyes moved around the room. They didn’t seem to jump from object to object. Instead, they slid over everything, even her. She imagined his eyes greased in their sockets, unable to hold a firm position. When he looked back to her, she realized how wrong she was. He was perfectly able to lock his eyes on her when he wanted to.
“There’s someone here who shouldn’t be,” The Origin said.
“A firm tether?” she asked.
He blinked. The act seemed to take several seconds as his tired eyelids dropped and then rose again.
She could see several versions of him at the same time. He was a relatively young, healthy man. He was also diseased and nearly dead—the skin peeling from his poisonous skeleton. He was also stabbed, beaten, and crushed. These images of The Origin were all projected on the man sitting in front of her. She was seeing his possible stories all at once.
“No,” he said. “This is a new presence.”
“Can I share my knowledge with it? Can I show it the path?”
The Origin evaluated her before he answered. He was administering a test. If she failed, he would find a way to eliminate her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps time will tell. You’re different from the others. You and I know each other from so many different versions of the past. You’re more awake.”
“Am I?”
“You’ll be my eyes. I have other pressing business.”
“Yurt,” she said, nodding.
The Origin shook his head. “Mike, Abe, and Terry will take care of Yurt and the others. You’ll be my eyes. I’ll be back to find out what you’ve learned.”
Carrie nodded. She wanted to ask a question that would have been completely wrong of her to ask. What did he mean by take care of? Those three words could have such different meanings. She was afraid that she knew exactly what he meant.
“You know what’s at stake,” The Origin said. He stood and walked through the door towards the kitchen.
Carrie held perfectly still, hoping that he was gone. She knew he wasn’t. He would be right there, just through the door, waiting for her to slip up. She would start talking to the voice inside herself and he would come back through and catch her in the act. This was all just a game to him. No matter what, he would win.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
Carrie counted off the seconds with the pounding heartbeat in her head. When she was sure that a full minute had passed without a sound from the kitchen, she rose and rushed to the doorway. He was gone, but his influence still hung in the air. His power was still being exerted through Mike, Terry, and Abe.
Carrie ran outside and rushed in the direction that Yurt had pointed. She tried to remember what she had told him. Was it Coolidge Street? Seven something? She saw the sign and turned. It was Coleridge Street. When she saw the numbers 712, they clicked. The door was open to the house, but the doors were open to most of the houses. Inside, Yurt would be looking for his father, and maybe someone else would be looking for Yurt. She hoped she wasn’t too late.
Before she made it through the door, she saw someone moving through the dark interior of the house. Carrie stopped. She wanted to protect Yurt—she was the one who had sent him to this place—but she had a deeper commitment to protect what was inside her.
“Hello?”
From the darkness, she heard a thump and then the creak of rusty hinges. Feet clomped down a flight of stairs. Carrie was still clutching the frame of the front door. Her hands held her back from going inside. It took great effort to let go and take that first step into the darkness.
“Abe?”
She had known him the longest, and hoped that he was the one who had come to “take care of” Yurt. Abe was gentle, fair, and reasonable. No matter what spell that The Origin had cast on him, she couldn’t imagine him doing something to hurt a stranger.
The curtains were drawn.
The house smelled of mildew and neglect, like so many others. Left with wide open doors and pipes full of water, many houses had been on a fast track to decay over the past couple of years. The houses had eaten themselves, from the inside out. This one looked like it had a jumpstart on the others that Carrie had seen. It had started its decline long before its owner had disappeared.
Under her feet, the floorboards groaned and cracked. In order to buy herself a little time, she had sent Yurt into this haunted house. She tried to remind herself that she didn’t owe Yurt anything. He was a complete stranger and probably wouldn’t lift a finger to help her if the situation was reversed. None of that helped at all to relieve her guilt.
S
he moved down the dark hall, looking for the door to the basement. That’s all she could picture when she thought about the sound of the hinges creaking. It would be a neglected, seldom-used door, probably leading down to a place rarely visited. Carrie spotted the door. It was still ajar.
It was even darker down there.
She saw a flash of light.
“Abe? It’s me, Carrie. I’m coming down.”
She took a step.
It wasn’t just her guilt that was driving her down the stairs. She was also following orders from The Origin, and he would know if she disobeyed. She had to be on the lookout for a threat that she knew didn’t exist. Carrie already knew what The Origin was looking for, and it wasn’t down in this basement.
Carrie took a second step. She felt around for her flashlight. It wasn’t in her pocket. She saw another flash of light from below and began to sense the glow down there. At the top of the stairs, it had been too dim to see. Blinking, she waited for her eyes to adjust.
She took another step.
Another idea occurred to her. Maybe The Origin had already figured out everything about the voice inside Carrie. Maybe she was the one being led into a trap.
“Abe?”
Calling out to him was wrong, regardless of what they intended to do. It only revealed that she didn’t have an understanding about what was happening in the basement. Anyone without an understanding was an outsider. It was dangerous to be an outsider with The Origin’s people.
She took another step and stopped.
Her eyes were wide open. When the light flashed again, passing by her feet on its sweep to somewhere more important, she saw that the blood was everywhere.
CHAPTER 48: NEW YORK CITY
“I DON’T CARE,” CORINNA said. She put her sword back in its sheath and turned north.
“Wait,” Robby said. “Think. Brad said that they already stabbed him, crushed his skull, and burned him. You’re not going to be able to hurt him like that.”
“I’ll find a way,” she said.
“Yes,” Robby said, “I believe you. You’re going to find a way, and it’s going to require all the information we have. What Brad described seeing on his way here is something that I’ve seen as well. Things are much worse down south, but they’re beginning to change here too. That phenomenon is undoubtedly connected to this man.”
Robby tugged at his shirt. The wound was closed, but the drying blood was sticking the shirt to his skin.
Corinna’s eyes went from Robby’s blood, down to her sword, and then back north. She was a person of action, and she had been standing still too long. She was clearly itching to do something.
“I hate to say it,” Brad said, “but your friend Liam is now contagious. That’s how this man works. He pulls people in and then gets them to help spread his hypnosis. I don’t know precisely the mechanism, but I’ve seen it. Actually, I’ve felt it. It’s dangerous to dwell on the past.”
His last sentence made her pause. Robby could see something going through her head. Based on what Brad had told them, he didn’t want to ask her about it.
“So, what do we do?” she asked.
Robby spoke. “He calls himself The Origin, but I think we need to find his origin.”
“Geographically?” Brad asked.
“Maybe,” Robby said. “I get the feeling that everything around us is turning on an axis. We need to find the center of that axis—geographic or otherwise.”
“How?” Brad asked.
Robby didn’t have an answer. They all stood in the street. Gordie looked up at Robby, who looked up towards the sky.
Corinna was done standing around. She began to walk north.
“I may not be able to kill him, but I bet I can make him feel pain,” she said. “I’ll find out about his origin.”
“No,” Brad said. “You can’t talk to him. It’s too dangerous.”
She didn’t slow down.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
Corinna walked fast, all the way back to the parking garage. Brad repeated parts of his story as he tried to convince her to abandon her violent plan. As they got closer to the garage entrance, Gordie pulled at the leash and Robby unclipped it. The dog jumped up on the concrete wall and wagged his tail. Above, they saw Prince’s head peer down from over the partition.
“As soon as he starts talking to you, the words form a pit,” Brad said. “It’s impossible to not slip down into it. If you’re already thinking about your grandfather, then you’ve already been exposed once. Next time, you might not snap out of it.”
“I’m good at blocking things out,” she said. She unlocked the entrance and began to climb the stairs. Brad caught the door before it closed.
“The answer is upstate,” Robby said. “I’m almost certain of it. Based on what Brad said that Tim and Ty told him, that must be where this entire thing began.”
She turned on the stairs and they stopped.
“Then you guys go upstate and do whatever you’re going to do. If you think I’m leaving Liam here with that weirdo, you’re crazy.”
“Based on everything we know, you can’t help him here,” Robby said.
At the top of the stairs, they heard scratching from the other side of the door. Gordie bounded up past Corinna and started sniffing at the gap under the door. They heard Prince whining from the other side.
Corinna pointed a finger down at Brad. “I heard about how he ran away from his own friends, and I ran away when Liam was acting strange. And running didn’t do either of us any good. I’m going to fix my mistake and get Liam back.”
“We tried that with Tim. Once they’re infected, you can’t get them back,” Brad said.
Corinna shrugged again.
She climbed the rest of the stairs, reached over Gordie, and opened the door.
It wasn’t just Prince on the other side. Liam was standing there, next to the dog. Gordie got one look at Liam and he turned and scrambled back down the stairs to Robby.
“Robby!” Liam said with a big smile. He clapped his little hands together.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
As soon as Brad saw the child, a flood of conflicting thoughts rushed into his head. There was something very familiar in the kid’s eyes—a happy desperation—that gripped Brad’s heart in icy fear. It was the same faraway, malevolent look that had been in Tim’s eyes when he had been whispering to Romie.
As frightening as the kid was, Brad was pulled to try to help him. Liam was controlled by something he couldn’t understand and he needed help. Watching Tim subsumed by obsession had been terrible. The idea of the same thing happening to an innocent child was heartbreaking.
The fear won.
Brad had come for Robby. He had come to find the young man and work with him to solve this problem. In fact, Robby already had a decent idea.
He reached up to put a hand on Robby’s shoulder just as Robby climbed another stair.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
Brad put a hand on Robby’s shoulder.
“It’s too late for him,” Brad whispered to Robby. “Maybe her, too.”
Corinna was the last thing on Robby’s mind. He could only stare at the kid and wonder why he had missed it before. Corinna called the kid Liam, but that wasn’t his name. His name was Jim and he grew up on the island a block away from Robby’s house. They had gone to the same kindergarten together. Jim had tricked Robby out of a pencil. Ever since then, they had been best friends.
Robby heard his father’s voice in his head say, “Jim’s older than that, Robby. You know that. Jim would be your age.”
Robby ignored his father’s voice. His father had been good at some things, and even had a decent amount of knowledge on a few subjects, but his intellect had not been his strongest trait. Sam’s best quality had been his even-tempered approach to life.
“You know that’s not him, Robby.”
Sam’s voice was wrong. The name Liam was wrong. It was Jim, and Robby had to protect him this time. Robby had let
Jim get up in the middle of the night, climb the stairs, and disappear. This time, he had to save him.
“Robby, what are you doing?” Brad asked.
Robby tried to pull away from Brad’s hand, but it was clamped to his shoulder, right where the sword had cut him. He could feel Brad’s grip beginning to reopen that wound. When he tried to duck away from Brad’s hand, he was tugged back.
Something was pulling at his leg, too. Robby looked down and realized that Gordie had sunk his teeth into the cuff of his jeans. The dog was pulling at his pants and Brad was holding onto his shoulder.
Robby reached a hand up towards Jim.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
When Corinna opened the door and saw Liam, she knew exactly what to do. She would grab him, drag him outside, and then get him to a safe distance. The kid was acting creepy, but she owed it to him. They had kept each other sane and alive for way too long for her to abandon him now. Whatever was wrong with him, she would figure it out eventually. In fact, maybe the shock of being out under the sky for the first time in a year would do the trick.
Before she could act on her plan, Liam smiled and spoke a single word.
“Robby!” Liam said.
Corinna stood frozen with shock.
She knew every color of Liam’s voice. She had heard him happy, frightened, sad, lonely, and excited. Liam had a particular way he pronounced words when he was tired, and a different way of speaking when he was hungry. Corinna could often pull more information from the way he said something than from his actual words.
This was not Liam.
The voice that came out of little Liam’s mouth belonged to someone who Corinna had never met. She was sure of it.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
