by Lauren Algeo
Brewer smiled ruefully, the kid always surprised him. ‘Good thinking, I’ll leave some of these other drugs scattered in the bathroom and some drawers and cupboards open. Ellen can you go round and clean everything we touched thoroughly? It doesn’t matter so much about where the hiker was, they won’t be able to trace her. Any fingerprints from her could lead them on a welcome wild goose chase.’
‘I’ll get on it.’ Ellen stood up from the table.
Brewer got to his feet too. They had now crossed into risky territory by stealing from someone’s house although there was no going back. ‘Let’s hurry up and get the hell out of here.’
Chapter 22
The Master sank into the familiar armchair and heard the creak of his weary bones. He had known something wasn’t right for weeks, he could feel it, and now Tabitha had confirmed his suspicions. His brother was dead.
He tried to send another pulse to her mind, as he had done a little while ago, but there was no response. She was gone. She’d said before that she was about to try and escape, that her tormentors had temporarily left her unguarded, only that attempt had obviously failed. Either that or they’d found a way to stop his daughter communicating with him.
Three of them. Out hunting his gifted children in a pack. His weathered right hand clenched slowly into a fist. His left one wasn’t much use to him now. He rued how his body had aged yet his mind was still agile. One hundred and twenty two was a lot of years after all.
He sat in his armchair and pondered what he had learnt. Tabitha hadn’t believed she had much time so she’d projected everything she could to his mind in one hit. The thoughts and images were jumbled and he made sense of them as best he could.
Her location was somewhere in Massachusetts however she hadn’t been able to pinpoint exactly where. Three people had poisoned her with some sort of venom and taken her to an unknown house. A vision of the three faces loomed to the front of his mind and his blood boiled with rage. Two men and a woman were trying to murder his children.
Had succeeded already, in fact. He’d known one of his sons had died in Connecticut a couple of days ago but Tabitha had gleaned from the woman’s memories that they were the ones who’d killed him. There had been a snippet of the woman shooting him with a long gun among the tangle of images.
Worst of all, one of the two men was responsible for killing his baby brother. The memories had been second-hand from the woman’s mind so he could only see the man telling her about it, rather than what had actually happened. The man had told her that he’d thought the Grand was dead, that he and another girl had killed him at his house in England. The Master didn’t know where that fourth person was now but he hoped she was dead.
He burned the man’s face into his memory so it could never fade. He would get revenge for his younger sibling. Not that he’d even liked his brother. In fact, he’d despised him from the moment he was born. Charles had ruined everything.
The Master had been almost eight years old when his brother came into the world. He had been named Philip by his mother and he’d been perfectly happy being an only child. For the last few years of his young life he’d begun to realise he was special. He could do things that other children couldn’t and he was much cleverer than them. He found that if he concentrated really hard he could make people do what he wanted with only the power of thought.
At first it made him feel tired afterwards but the more he practiced, the stronger he became. He would get a delicious rush from making people do mischievous things. Ones that got them in to trouble so he could feed off their shame. He was busy enjoying his little secret when mother gave birth to Charles.
He hadn’t liked him from the moment she brought him home from the hospital. He was small and red, and made too much noise. The screams cut through his ears and broke his concentration. If they went out anywhere, he couldn’t practice his mind games with Charles’ crying drowning out people’s thoughts. He grew very angry. He considered painful ways to get rid of his little brother to make himself feel better.
When Charles turned two, he realised his brother had the same gift as him. And he not only had it, his was ten times stronger. One day, he’d found himself fetching a toy for Charles against his will. His brother hadn’t spoken out loud, he didn’t talk very much, but he’d still heard Charles’ voice in his head asking for the ball. Insisting he have it immediately, and he had gone to pick it up before it occurred to him what had happened. He’d thrown the ball in anger and left the room.
He’d always had to focus on getting people to oblige his whims, yet it seemed to come easily to Charles. He didn’t even realise yet what he was doing. Their mother pandered to his brother’s every need, spending hours at a time playing with him and reading to him, while he skulked in the background. He didn’t like to be alone in a room with Charles, his stronger gift made him nervous, so he avoided him as much as possible.
The older Charles got, the less attention the Master got for himself. His mother barely knew he was alive any more – she was consumed by his brother. Their father was a relative stranger, who worked long hours and came home after bedtime. His younger brother was just too powerful for him. It scared him, and also made him angry.
Above all, as much as he hated to admit it, he was jealous. The sick feeling of envy ate at him from the inside. Why hadn’t his gift been as strong as Charles’? Why didn’t he get as much power and attention? How he hated him.
When he was twelve and Charles was nearly four, he decided to leave. No one really knew he was there anyway so it was easy. He doubted Charles ever remembered that he had a brother. It was 1902 and he’d heard about boats taking people to a country called America. He packed his clothes one day, travelled to the docks, and slipped onto one of the big steamships to take him far away.
He’d scoured the boat carefully to find what he needed. There was a rich, childless couple from London who were taking First Class passage to New York. He honed in on their minds and worked solidly for a couple of days to convince them that they had adopted him. They’d secretly been wanting a child for a while so it was relatively easy.
When they eventually got to America, he discovered he’d hit the jackpot. The couple were far wealthier than he’d anticipated. They bought a huge house outside of New York, with servants and plenty of land. He swanned about the place feeling like a king. The servants called him ‘Master Philip’ then eventually just ‘Master’, and he liked that very much.
His new ‘father’ made money on transportation and pioneering automobiles. A few years later, Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to ride in one of the automobiles his father’s company worked on. They travelled to Connecticut especially to see it and he loved everyone’s heightened excitement. Not as much as he loved pain though.
He kept working on his technique until he could manipulate people at will. He found a brief thought of his brother was enough to fuel a burning anger that made him much stronger. He thrived on being the only person in his household with this gift.
By the time he turned twenty years old he was an accomplished murderer. The thrill of death was euphoric and causing people pain gave him more pleasure than he’d ever felt before.
Sadly his adoptive parents died in an automobile accident. Of course, it hadn’t really been an accident – he had been putting his skills to the test. He was grateful to them for giving him his new life in America but he had no feelings for them otherwise. They had just been pawns in his game and he no longer needed them. He was the only Master of the house now.
He sold their place and bought a new, even bigger house in West Tennessee. It had everything he could ever need, and there were plenty of fresh minds in the intriguing new state to occupy him.
When he was twenty-three, he fathered his first child. A boy, who he named Theodore, after the previous president he had gone to see. After bearing his child Theodore’s mother was of no further use so he cast her aside with no memory of the pregnancy. His gift was well develope
d now, and although he’d had to work harder at getting people to bend to his will, he found he had other talents. He could mix up people’s thoughts and memories, and make them so confused they couldn’t remember things. He found it amusing to make them forget certain facts then enjoy their struggle to recall them.
He fathered as many children as he could, taking them all back to his estate and training them as soon as they were ready. He only kept the children who displayed his gift at an early age; the other ones were of no relevance to him. They were weak and swiftly disposed of. He trained his strong offspring to manipulate and murder. They enjoyed it as much as he did.
When they were old enough, he allowed them to travel around the country at will. He’d found they were all connected to his mind so he could keep track of them. He had over a dozen children – his army of mind-controlling soldiers. They were allowed to kill whenever they wanted, as long as they blended in and the family secret remained undiscovered.
He tried to keep tabs on his brother back in England although it was difficult at first. News was too slow to travel across the vast sea and it was hard to spot his brother’s handiwork. When air travel became commercialised he took a flight to London to investigate. As soon as he arrived in the city, he could feel something in the air. It took him a while to pinpoint the sensation to a lone man. He knew instinctively that this was one of Charles’ sons. The power of the gift oozed from his pores, giving off a scent of evil. He followed the man, who was fairly young and looked similar to his own sons. He tracked him for two days and learnt a lot of interesting facts.
Charles was now calling himself ‘Grand’ and he had indeed fathered his own children. He heard Charles’ voice on the second day, instructing his son to kill a certain man in a specific town. His brother had never been much of a talker and spoke slowly, in a cold, menacing voice. It was odd to hear it after all those years, and so grown up. He wondered if Charles would be able to hear him too then remembered he’d never been inside Charles’ mind, only the other way around. His presence in the country would remain a mystery. After listening for a while, he realised that the set up was far different to his own back in America.
Over here, they killed chosen targets. Someone that another person had paid to have murdered. They were hired assassins. The idea sent a shiver down his spine. He hadn’t considered that notion. It made them like gods.
He watched the son kill his target then follow it by making another person, this time a woman, commit suicide. It seemed to be a ritual for them – a way to wind down after the thrill of the first kill. He found that very strange. His brother was controlling and had imposed too many rules.
He preferred his own children to have the freedom to express themselves. He could see no reason to reign in their creativity by making them curb their power after each kill. Murder or suicide, it was their choice. Sometimes it was a combination of both.
He travelled back home armed with the new idea of contract kills. Hunting for people who wanted someone else dead was fun. To start with, he didn’t even charge for the service. He found that often people who wished someone dead in the privacy of their minds didn’t actually want it when it happened. They were shocked and upset and scared – all very pleasurable emotions. He found the odd case that was worthwhile for one of his children to be hired to carry out, but it wasn’t a large part of his life. They didn’t need the money or notoriety; they lived their lives for the pursuit of pleasure.
It had gone smoothly for many decades. There were now over forty of his kin, roaming free across the states. His brother didn’t know of his existence and never travelled to America, yet he kept an eye on him all the same. It was easy now he knew what to look for in news stories, and later the invention of the internet helped with his monitoring.
Yes, they’d had a perfect existence so far but now everything was in jeopardy due to these interfering monsters. The only plus side he could see from this ungodly situation was that these people didn’t know anything about him yet. They somehow thought the Grand was back from the dead and he trusted that Tabitha would not reveal anything about him.
They would find out who he was soon enough though, he would make sure of that.
Chapter 23
Brewer, Mitch and Ellen spent three hours on the road and didn’t pick up any trace of a hiker. They stopped for a quick breakfast at a diner in Springfield then continued on the I-88, across the New York state. Ellen sat rigidly behind the wheel and Mitch slumped on the back seat. He flicked through some newspapers Brewer had made them pick up at a gas station as soon as they’d crossed into the state.
Brewer had done a bit of research on the laptop but hadn’t found anything of note. Mitch had more luck with a small article in one of the papers. It was about a murder-suicide involving a father and son in a town called Binghamton. It was the only sniff of a story they’d seen so far and they decided to head there without stopping in other towns.
‘I don’t think there are as many hikers over here,’ Brewer mused. ‘With so many towns per state, there should be a lot more activity to pick up but there’s nothing. It’s as if there’s only one per state or something.’
‘Or they’re just more clever at hiding it,’ Mitch shrugged.
‘That can’t be it,’ Ellen said. ‘We managed to spot the other stories.’
‘That’s another odd thing,’ Brewer said. ‘We’ve only encountered one actual job so far – the Paige Clarke murder. I’m not entirely convinced the girl in the sauna back in Philly was a paid for target. There doesn’t seem to be a clear set of rules over here. The hikers are executing weird hybrids of violence, murder and suicide.’
‘Are you thinking about what she said?’ Ellen asked, glancing across at him.
Brewer nodded. ‘It was playing on my mind earlier.’
‘What did she say?’ Mitch demanded. ‘I thought you said she only told you her name and age?’
‘She did,’ Ellen said. ‘But she also said something about the Grand, or rather she didn’t. She didn’t know who he was at first, but then Scott called him her father and she responded. Only she referred to him as Master.’
‘So?’ Mitch asked.
‘So, I’m starting to think they aren’t the same person at all.’ Brewer turned to face them both.
‘Hang on a minute,’ Mitch frowned. ‘You’re saying the Grand is still dead and this is some other dude controlling all the hikers over here?’
‘It’s a strong possibility,’ Brewer nodded.
‘Who do we think this Master is then?’ Ellen asked. ‘A son of the Grand perhaps, who travelled over here?’
‘Either that or someone entirely unrelated,’ Brewer said. ‘I’m hoping the next hiker we find will be able to tell us.’
‘The Warfarin should give us a window for interrogation,’ Ellen agreed.
They lapsed back into silence, albeit with the radio murmuring down low. Brewer searched online but couldn’t find anything more about the Binghamton murder-suicide. They would need to find a local newspaper when they got closer.
The drive to the town only took another hour, and it was close to the state line for crossing into Pennsylvania afterwards. The clock had crept around to lunchtime and they found a fast food restaurant and a shop with local papers. Ellen went to find a toilet while Brewer and Mitch ate burgers in the car and flipped though the news.
‘It’s in here,’ Mitch mumbled through a mouthful of cheeseburger.
Brewer wiped his greasy fingers on a napkin then took the paper from him. The story covered nearly half of the right-hand page. It was described as a tragedy that had shocked the community and Brewer could see why. The father, Patrick Callaghan, had apparently shot his son at point blank range in the chest before turning the gun to his own head. The son was called Sean and he’d only been nineteen years old.
As yet, the police had no clue as to why this had happened. Patrick Callaghan had no history of mental illness, although there had been some rumours of a gambling
addiction. There were several paragraphs dedicated to Sean’s excellent school record and promising football career. He’d been a talented boy with no trouble in his life. The only mention of Mrs Callaghan said that she’d been away on business and would like privacy at this difficult time.
‘Interesting,’ Brewer said, handing the paper back to Mitch.
‘You think it’s a hiker?’
‘Could be.’ Brewer wasn’t sure, nothing about the story sparked his hiker alarm, but they had nothing else right now.
He looked up the family and found an address for them on the west side of town. He slid over into the driver’s seat and as soon as Ellen came back, they set off.
The murder had occurred late the previous afternoon and the Callaghan residence was still cordoned off by police tape. Brewer doubted there was still any investigation going on at the house; Mrs Callaghan must not have been home yet and removed it.
‘Shall we go in and have a look around?’ Mitch asked.
Ellen gaped at him, aghast. ‘No! That’s a murder scene! I draw the line at that.’
‘We don’t need to,’ Brewer said. ‘There’s nothing in there that will tell us if a hiker was involved. I can’t hear one out here. Ellen, can you feel one?’
She shook her head. ‘Nope, the town’s been hiker-free so far.’
‘We can find someone who saw Mr Callaghan yesterday and see if he was acting strangely,’ Brewer said. ‘Mrs Callaghan is out, as she was away, but did he have a job?’
Mitch rechecked the article. ‘Oh yeah, they refer to him once as “Baker, Patrick Callaghan”. It doesn’t say where though.’
It wasn’t too difficult to find out, there was a bakery delivery van parked on the road outside the house. Brewer found an address for Smith & Callaghan’s bakery and drove the ten minutes to the location.
The bakery was closed. He got out of the car, alone, and went to the entrance. The doors were locked and he peered though the glass. There was a man sitting in the gloom, at a small table to the left of the counter.
