A better person than her would have gone back to Elysium on her own and drained the pool before now. But she’d barely gone anywhere alone after Marshall had slammed her into the side of the pool; she’d never been subjected to that kind of violence before, had never even been threatened with it. It left her feeling so timid, broken down. And yes, a little privileged not to have known that kind of fear before, but still terribly ashamed at how badly it had sidelined her. Of course, she had gone to replace her water-ruined cell phone on her own, but that had been a real struggle. As she was standing in line at the Sprint store, her hand had traveled reflexively to the welt on the back of her head, and as soon as her fingers grazed the enduring soreness there, she found herself in a panic, looking over both shoulders, convinced that Marshall was about to come barreling into the store, a semiautomatic pointed at her head.
Just point. Divine inspiration. This is what she’d been looking for ever since they’d pulled away from the house. First thing, walk to the pool, turn on the light and point and say, “What the hell is that stuff?” You’ll have warned everyone, no one will get exposed without their knowledge. And it won’t be a lie because fact is, you still don’t know what that crap actually is.
It was perfect. She’d been overthinking everything. What else was new?
Just point.
She was on the verge of laughing aloud at this simple revelation when a pickup truck flew past them going in the opposite direction, and in the rearview mirror, Nikki saw the truck’s headlights illuminate the large black snake sliding across her mother’s chest.
Darkness descended. She told herself it was a trick of the eye. But she could hear its scales rustling against her mother’s blouse.
Her lips parted; she heard herself wheeze. She went to reach for her father’s arm and saw the speedometer. They were hurtling down the highway at seventy-five miles per hour. And so she froze. She froze because the snake she’d seen had been huge, body almost as thick as her wrist, scales the color of smoke. A water moccasin, it had to be. And yes, yes, yes, snakes only attack when their territory is threatened, but this bastard had been removed from his territory and placed in hers and so there were no rules. There were no rules and oh my God it was huge and her mother couldn’t wake up because she’d scream and if she screamed, what would she—
“Dad,” Nikki whispered.
The head. She needed to see the head. Her father had taught her everything about snakes when she was a little girl. Too many things, in fact. He’d scared her so badly that she’d never after ventured farther than a few yards from the trailers at Elysium without Ben right beside her. She had to see the head. If it was rounded, they were okay. They would be fine. But if it was flat and pointed, then—
Millie Delongpre stirred, let out a soft grunt, the same kind of sound she made when she took an unexpected bite of cilantro. She hated cilantro. Then, her eyes still closed, she lifted one hand toward her chest and that’s when Nikki screamed, “Mom! Don’t!”
Ear-piercing screams. Her father shouting “Hey hey hey what?” And suddenly her mother was a dancing silhouette in the backseat, arms pinwheeling, the snake lost to shadow, no way to tell if she’d been struck. Dancing up and over the backseat, onto the bench seat behind it, still screaming, still oblivious to her daughter’s cries.
Then Nikki saw it. The snake was coiling up on the floor of the backseat, all five feet of it, poised to strike. And her mother was still screaming and screaming. All three of them were now. A deranged blend of pure fear and desperate cries for calm.
Then they hit the guardrail.
There was a deafening pop that was louder than the rest of the chaos and it felt as if Nikki’s wrists had caught fire; she’d thrown her hands out in front of her just as the air bags had exploded. Shards of glass skated across her cheeks and nose. Her father was thrown backward against his seat, tongue jutting lewdly from between his teeth, eyes slits. Then came the water, a great, dark green curtain of it that turned milky in the plunging headlights before slamming into the spiderwebbed windshield. Everything shifted underneath her; the tail of the giant SUV was spinning outward from the bank, and they were floating. Floating under the highway bridge, the nose of the Lexus dipping further below the surface, floating past dark banks of knotted cypress branches and nothing else, no boathouses, no lights in the dark. And in a deranged instant, Nikki felt as if the shattering glass, the exploding air bags, her broken wrists all amounted to a blessed thing, because they had all brought an end to her mother’s terrible screams.
Her father was out cold, slumped forward against his seat belt in the space left by the rapidly deflating air bag. Lukewarm water rose over her ankles as it poured in through the door frame. Behind her, the snake was swimming in frenzied circles in the flooding backseat. But when she went to reach for her seat belt, her broken wrist sent rings of fire up her arms and she cried out in agony. The pain triggered something else; a headache, just like the one she’d suffered for days after her awful night with Marshall. Only this one was stronger, much stronger, and for a few seconds, she feared she’d broken part of her skull along with her wrists.
Then Nikki Delongpre lifted her eyes to the rearview mirror, and that’s when she saw that the world had changed.
It was worse than the brief, grayscale distortions the headaches had brought on previously. The world itself had gone silvery and luminescent, and where her mother was crouched and frozen in the very back seat, her form seemed to be shedding tendrils of bioluminescence. It was as if the intense pressure inside her skull had given way, and left her seeing invisible threads of . . . she didn’t know what, so the words that danced through her brain next were stroke, aneurysm, cerebral hemorrhage. But there was another feeling, and it was in her chest, and it was pure pleasure. A sense that she was taking in great, greedy gulps of the purest oxygen she’d ever inhaled, and it was cleansing her, dousing the pain in her broken wrists, numbing her to slick swamp water crawling up her legs.
And then she heard her mother say, “Stroke. Aneurysm. Cerebral hemorrhage.” But Nikki was allowed only a second or two of realizing that her mother had just spoken her thoughts aloud before it felt as if she was thrown from her body. Suddenly, she had only the vaguest sense of her back resting against the wet leather seat. Up and down had become relative terms, and the hallucinations that gripped her were more than vivid, they were multidimensional and she wasn’t sure if they were passing through her or she was passing through them. Cypress branches and string lights and the voice of Louis Armstrong coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, and then her father down on one knee before her, crying, extending a ring in one hand. But her father’s face was so intricate, so vivid, so real, that Nikki knew this couldn’t be the product of her own mind—she had never known her father’s face that well when he was so young. No, some fundamental piece of her mother’s memory, of her mother’s very soul, was passing through her. And then when her young father leapt to his feet, screaming, and the tall grass all around them began shifting from the motion of a hundred approaching serpents, Nikki realized that her mother’s soul had been irreparably damaged by what had just happened in the concrete world. That what was pushing through Nikki was a terrible hybrid of her mother’s greatest joy and her greatest terror.
And then the hallucination was over, but the delicious, unzipped feeling was still in her chest, the world still swimming in silvery luminescence that both mirrored and danced gracefully with all the solid elements of the ordinary world.
Nikki imagined the fish-skinning tools she’d seen her father load into the back of the SUV, and her mother turned, pulled the case out from between two suitcases.
Nikki envisioned one of the curved steel blades and her mother, who was miraculously and entirely under Nikki’s control, unzipped the set and withdrew the tube skinner.
Then, before she could think twice, Nikki drove her mother to reach down and seize the snake by the neck, and because she had been drained of all life, Millie
Delongpre did so without a moment’s fear or hesitation.
She lifted the snake from the rising water, its body whipping like a horse’s tail. Then she slammed it against the back of the seat in one hand, plunged the tube skinner into the center of its fat body and dragged the blade down its length. The snake’s breaking ribs made a sound like glass crunching under a boot heel. Once it was filleted, Nikki forced her mother to cast the limp, scaled body into the cargo bay and crawl forward over the backseat, through the water, then over the armrest, until her breasts were resting on Nikki’s lap and her legs resting across her father’s.
There was a gun in the glove compartment, but there was no way Nikki could manage it with her broken wrists, not without possibly killing one of them. She drove her mother to stretch across her lap, and as her hands struggled with the latch, her eyes were wide but vacant, her face betrayed no frustration. The door wouldn’t budge. The window was closed and intact and the pressure of the water was holding the door shut from the other side.
There was no other choice. Still shrouded in silvery, shifting halos, her mother opened the glove compartment and removed the black pistol inside, unsnapping it from its holster, raising it and pressing its barrel directly against the glass; all of which Nikki commanded her to do with a series of simple visual images she had placed in her own mind.
Then she forced her mother to fire. While the word had been visually altered in ways previously unknown to her, the sound of the gunshot was deafening and vicious. Her father jerked awake next to her. And it was only then that Nikki realized she’d never heard a real gunshot before, and certainly never so close. The muzzle flare blinded her, seemed to scald her face with flecks of white-hot powder. When she screamed, so did her mother, only Millie’s sounded like a mute’s pantomime.
Then it felt as Nikki’s entire rib cage had been pulled on by a giant hand. The impossible connection she’d forged with her mother had been disrupted in the blink of an eye, and she could feel it being yanked away from her now. Her instinct was to pull back, but when she followed it, there were searing flashes of pain inside her skull, and after a white flare that wiped her vision, the normal, shadowed world and all its gory, wet darkness returned.
Water was pouring in through the fresh gunshot in the passenger-side window. The SUV was tipping nose forward. Her father was scrambling out of the pitching, sinking vehicle. But her mother had rolled onto her back in Nikki’s lap. And even though her eyes were wide, she still looked lifeless and hollowed out; she didn’t react as the water rose over her face. That’s when Nikki realized that her mother was shuddering, teeth knocking together, arms jerking and splashing in the water.
You did this to her. You had a connection with her, some kind of impossible connection, and then the gunshot scared you and it all went wrong. And now . . . And now . . .
The SUV tipped forward, the windshield suddenly flat with the bayou’s surface. More water gushed through the gunshot window, but before it rose to cover Millie Delongpre’s face, Nikki saw the woman’s eyes collapse until her pupils were great yawning black holes, spreading outward to devour her forehead. And her mouth; her mouth opened as if she were about to scream, but the teeth inside folded in on themselves and blackened, and before the bayou filled the interior of the car, Nikki realized that whatever she’d just done to her mother, it was turning her body into something formless and primordial, something in which flesh and bone were being reduced to the same fluid consistency.
And then the water claimed them both, and suddenly Nikki Delongpre was kicking and struggling, the pain in her wrists causing her to scream, causing her to swallow water which set fire to lungs that just seconds earlier had been blessed by oxygen so pure it seemed to come from heaven.
Something was grabbing her. And it had tendrils. Snakes? More snakes? She kicked at them and batted them away, before she realized that whatever it was, it was changing shape in the water around her. It was grasping at her. And she could hear the sound of metal being rent all around her. Whatever was clawing at her, it was clawing at the car too, with greater success. And it was getting bigger.
She was yanked upward, suitcases knocking into her, pulled up through the darkness by some tremendous force. At first, she thought it was just air pressure forcing her out of the car as it sank nose-first toward the bottom of the bayou. But she was rising too quickly, and when she exploded through the punched-out rear window of the SUV, lungs aflame, she kept rising up into the air, until her legs were dangling. And that’s when she felt a massive pressure against her chest.
The creature that stood perched on the sinking, upended tail of the Lexus, water sluicing down its scaled body, was at least seven feet tall, and it had her mother’s eyes. They were shaped like inverted teardrops, the largest features on a conical head, but they were Millie’s and they were huge and they were blinking madly with newfound life. The rest of its face and humanoid body were covered in giant versions of the smoke-colored scales of a water moccasin. The monster’s mouth was a long, lipless leer, and on its back, three thick, scaled tentacles danced through the air behind it, meeting in a knotted amalgam of muscle and tendon against its upper back, a grotesque knapsack that made its lithe, slender body look like that of a butterfly. The tentacles flexed and coiled, a constant roil of serpentine energy, assuming a graceful pose one minute, a predatory stance the next.
It was a living nightmare. Her mother’s living nightmare, and whatever Nikki had done to her, it had turned her mother into this thing that now held her in two claws, high above the rippling water. The creature’s mouth opened, revealing row upon row of jagged teeth shaped like snake fangs. Then there was a loud pop and the creature’s right eye exploded, shedding ocher-colored gelatin across Nikki’s chest. Then another, then another, as her father, standing on the nearby bank, emptied the pistol from the glove compartment into the creature’s head before it could speak its first words. By the third shot, the creature released Nikki from its claws, and the water closed over her once again, just as she glimpsed the monster her mother had become tumble sideways off the tail of the Lexus with deadweight.
FROM THE JOURNALS OF NIQUETTE DELONGPRE
* * *
I’m not lying when I say I only remember scraps of what came afterwards. My father carrying me deep into the cypresses. The floor of the abandoned boathouse we took refuge in. The sound of my father stealing the tiny skiff. I remember helping him haul the monster into the back of the boat and then breaking down into something between sobs and screams when I realized what I was doing.
Actually, a couple months later, right before I was drifting off to sleep one night, I remembered what set me off. It was the sight of one of my mother’s hideously enlarged hazel eyes rolling up to meet mine in that scaled . . . thing’s face.
Dad told me later that the place where we hid out was a fishing camp that had belonged to a patient of his who had died of pneumonia during recovery; his widow had confided in my father that she couldn’t bring herself to clear the place out and sell it.
But for me, it’s all a jumble. I didn’t think I’d wake up and be told it was a dream. But part of me hoped the sparkling world I had seen with my altered vision as I had controlled my mother like a puppet would return to embrace me and carry me away. That the monster my mother had become, and the sounds of my father’s deranged sobs, were just the unfortunate side effects of having been returned to a solid, ordinary world I no longer belonged to.
My first clear and simple memory is of wandering through the swamp, summoning that blissful unzipped feeling and using it on the animals in my vicinity. There was no burst of having looked into someone’s soul, but I was able to place a few birds under my control for a dazzling five to ten minutes. And then their heads exploded and they tumbled to the ground, tiny masses of gore. They didn’t change shape or form, aside from this gruesome split-second death I triggered.
I can use my ability without creating monsters. And I can use it for an almost limitless amount
of time on strangers in ordinary settings. God knows, I used it plenty to get us out of the city without being detected. But it’s not just a reaction to a sudden shock or trauma that will pervert the connection; it’s any swell of deep emotion within me. I’ve had a few close calls this past year, and they weren’t all the result of being frightened or distracted. In every one, the person I’d hooked bore some physical similarity to someone out of my past; a tense set to their brow that reminded me of Anthem, a full, generous mouth that reminded me of Ben, a perfume that reminded me of my mother. And when these qualities distracted me, when they stirred memories that began with a seed of nostalgia and then flowered into blossoms of grief and loss, that’s when things almost went full nightmare again. There’s only a few seconds in which I can break the connection before my instincts take over and I pull back against that horrible tug on my rib cage. But it’s a tiny window, and if I’m a second off . . .
That’s why total strangers are the most easily controlled. No emotional connection. Their bursts of soul that rush through me are brief, nothing like the overpowering sensations of my mother’s soul flooding through me. And that’s the terrible tragedy I live with every day. It was my love for her, my connection to her, my inability to detach from her as I manipulated her like a doll that caused her own nightmares to consume her physical form.
There’s still so much we don’t know about what I can do. The samples haven’t told us much. He calls it the Elysium parasite and it seems to have stuck with both of us; so much for the nickname I came up with—swamp sperm. And that’s just fine, I guess. My MRI didn’t tell us much either. There’s swelling in some areas where there shouldn’t be and his working theory is that they’re still in there. The parasite. His working theory is that they’ve altered fundamental, nonvisible light waves in me that make up my soul, thereby allowing me to suck on and take in the nonvisible light waves that make up the soul of someone else.
The Heavens Rise Page 19
