Black Lightning

by John Saul

  Tentatively, he reached out and touched it lightly with a single finger. Then he picked it up, turning it over in his hand, examining it the way he liked to examine everything he came in contact with. It seemed perfectly all right—no cracks in its case; its hard plastic shell hadn’t even chipped when it struck the porcelain of the sink. Satisfied, he held the appliance to his face and gently rubbed it over his right cheek.

  And instantly dropped it as millions of tiny electric needles seemed to shoot from the shaving head into his skin.

  Picking the shaver up again, the Experimenter turned it over in his hand once more.

  There was a flaw in it—there had to be.

  There were flaws in everything, if you looked closely enough. He’d found that out from all the examinations he’d conducted. In even the most perfect of the specimens he’d observed, he’d always been able to find a flaw. So now he turned his full concentration to the shaver, focusing his mind, searching for the cause of the shocks he’d just felt. Yet no matter how hard he looked, he could find no sign of damage.

  The object sat in his hand, purring and vibrating almost like a living thing.

  The Experimenter’s mind began to work once more, and his yearning to understand the force he’d felt grew stronger.

  Had it truly been electricity he’d felt?

  He pressed the shaver against his skin, and felt again the prickling tingle.

  This time, though, it felt slightly different.

  Different, and familiar.

  He moved the appliance over the skin of his face, and now he imagined it was something else.

  The touch of a finger, stroking him gently, exciting him.

  The stroke of a woman.

  Yes, that was it. It felt like the stroke of a woman, and he’d felt it before. The same erotically caressing sensation, as if an electrical charge were flowing out of her.

  But how could it be flowing out of the thing in his hand?

  It wasn’t alive, it held no blood, carried no spirit, no energy of its own. It was only an object, totally inanimate. Yet the tingling … the tingling … He had to know.

  Had to experiment, as he always had before.

  Clutching the shaver with the same grip he’d used on all his subjects—tight enough for security, but not so tightly as to harm—the Experimenter carried it to the basement below the house.

  Excitement was growing in him—the same excitement he’d always felt before one of his experiments—and it was good to feel it again.

  He’d been idle too long.

  He pulled the string of the fluorescent light suspended above the three two-by-twelve planks that formed a rough workbench. Laying the shaver down, he glanced around the area, finding a toolbox at the end of the bench, exactly where it should be. Rummaging through it, he found a set of miniature tools. Choosing a tiny Phillips screwdriver, he set to work.

  As always, he worked in the nude.

  Twenty minutes later the shaver lay in pieces, the major section of its black case broken into three fragments. Its motor and battery sat next to the case, the wires of the motor torn away from their connections to the battery. The gears that connected the three blades were scattered on the bench, and the Experimenter knew they would never be fitted together again.

  Like all his previous researches, this one, too, had ultimately failed.

  The Experimenter stood trembling in the basement, glowering at the ruined shaver, his frustration and anger growing by the second.

  Why hadn’t he been able to find what he’d been searching for?

  Why hadn’t he been able to determine from where the energy in the shaver had been leaking?

  He knew he’d felt it—even now he could almost feel the tingling on his face!

  It should have been perfectly simple. An idiot should have been able to take the machine apart, find the flaw, fix it, and reassemble it!

  After all, it wasn’t a living tiling. It was only an object!

  And now it was broken beyond repair, or at least beyond his ability to repair it Seized suddenly by a desire to be rid of the offending object—a desire that was at least as strong as had been his urge to disassemble it—the Experimenter picked up the pieces of the shaver, mounted the stairs, and left the house through the back door. Crossing the yard, he strode past the garage, toward the back fence where the four recycling barrels were lined up.

  Lifting the lid of the first one that came to hand, he threw the broken shaver inside, slammed the lid back onto the can, and started back toward the house.

  He was halfway across the yard when he heard a faint gasp.

  Stopping short, the Experimenter glanced around, his attention immediately caught by a flicker of movement from the house next door.

  He was being watched.

  A blowzy-looking woman had been about to step out onto her back porch. The Experimenter gazed coldly at her, and for a brief moment their eyes locked. Then, as if frightened by what she was seeing, the woman’s face turned scarlet and she backed away, disappearing into her house as suddenly as she’d come. Her back door slammed sharply behind her.

  Only when she was gone did the Experimenter finally turn away and start once more back toward the house from which he’d emerged only a few moments ago.

  The razor was already forgotten.

  Now he was thinking about the woman next door, and an idea was beginning to form in his mind.

  But was it really time to begin again?

  And was the woman truly a proper subject?

  He would have to think about it.

  Think about it, and make preparations.

  CHAPTER 25

  … the police are “satisfied” that Richard Kraven was solely responsible for the series of murders that seemingly came to a halt when he was arrested and charged in another state. But the detective also pointedly repeated that “it has yet to be fully proven that all the victims attributed to Kraven have been discovered.” Nor would Blakemoor go so far as to absolutely rule out the possibility that Kraven did not act alone in the crimes attributed to him.

  Sheila Harrar gazed at the paragraph through bleary eyes, the hangover from last night’s party making her feel as if someone were pounding spikes through her skull. Squinting even against the gray daylight in Pioneer Square, Sheila tried to concentrate on the rest of the words in the stained piece of the morning paper she’d found abandoned on the bench along with almost half a cup of not-quite-cold coffee. But it didn’t matter if she finished the article or not—she’d already read enough.

  There was at least one body they hadn’t found yet—Danny’s. And now it wasn’t just the police who didn’t care—it was the paper, too. Sheila had waited all day for that woman to call back. What was her name? Then she remembered that she’d saved the other article, stuffing it into the canvas bag with the rest of her important papers. Still clutching the remainder of the cup of tepid coffee in one hand, Sheila burrowed deep into the tote bag with the other, feeling around until her fingers finally closed on the crumpled scrap of newspaper. Spreading it out flat on the wooden bench, she forced her eyes to focus on the print.

  Anne Jeffers. Yeah, that was the name of the woman she’d left a message for. When had it been? Sheila wasn’t sure, but she knew she’d waited all day long for the woman to call back, only going out when she had to scrounge up something to eat. But the woman had never called back, and Sheila knew why.

  It was because she was an Indian.

  A drunken Indian.

  Sheila’s fist closed on the paper cup, crumpling it. She hadn’t felt very good that morning when she called the newspaper. Not as bad as this morning, but not good, either. Maybe the woman had tried to call her back, but she hadn’t been there to answer the pay phone in the hall. And if someone else had answered it, they sure wouldn’t have bothered to give her the message.

  Nobody who lived in the hotel gave a damn about anybody else.

  Suddenly Sheila wanted a drink. She heaved herself to her feet a
nd immediately a wave of dizziness and nausea struck her. Gripping the back of the bench with both hands, she bent over and retched onto the bricks of the square.

  Not much came up, and she was left feeling just as bad as she had before, except now her mouth was filled with the sour taste of vomit. Wishing she could sink through the bricks and disappear into the ground, but knowing it wouldn’t happen, Sheila Harrar shuffled over to the drinking fountain at the corner and filled her mouth with water, swirled it around, then spit it out. This time, though, she spit carefully into the catch basin around the fountain’s mouthpiece rather than spew more of her expectoration onto the sidewalk.

  What the hell good was she like this? If she was ever going to find out what had happened to Danny, she had to pull herself together.

  She burrowed into her tote bag again, this time finding a few stray coins hidden among the odds and ends that had gathered in its corners. She gazed at the money, automatically calculating how much wine she could buy with it.

  An image of Danny came into her mind, and she determinedly ignored her body’s craving for alcohol. Making her way down to First Avenue, she went into one of the cafés that catered to the neighborhood derelicts as long as they had the price of one of its cheap meals, and ordered a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Though her stomach threatened to rebel once again at the unaccustomed intrusion of food so early in the day, she consumed the entire pastry, washing it down with two cups of coffee. As she ate she had a long talk with Danny, even though he wasn’t really there to talk to her:

  Maybe she never got the message, Danny’s voice suggested. Or maybe you didn’t wait by the phone as long as you think.

  “I waited,” Sheila muttered, then made herself stop talking out loud, as the person two stools away glanced at her.

  Maybe you only waited a couple of minutes, then went out and got drunk, Danny’s implacable voice went on.

  Sheila didn’t try to argue with him—she knew he was right. In fact, she might not even have left the right number for Anne Jeffers to call her at.

  Better call her again. She got off the stool and started toward the rest rooms at the back of the café, where she knew there was a pay phone. Leafing through the phone book in search of the number of the Herald, she suddenly had an idea.

  What if Anne Jeffers had never even gotten her message at all? What if it had just gone into one of those machines, and no one had ever listened to it? Dropping the yellow pages, Sheila picked up the white pages and began thumbing through them. A minute later she found it. “Jeffers, Glen & Anne,” were listed, up at the fancy end of Capitol Hill.

  Dropping a quarter into the slot, Sheila dialed the number. On the eighth ring, just as she was about to hang up, someone answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Anne Jeffers there? The one who works for the paper?”

  “This is her residence, but she’s at work now. May I take a message?”

  Sheila hesitated, but then made up her mind. At least this time she was talking to a real person, and if it was Anne Jeffers’s house, then she’d probably get the message. “I left a message at the paper, but she didn’t call me back,” Sheila said, pronouncing each word very carefully in the hope that whoever she was talking to wouldn’t know how drunk she’d been last night. “Are you her husband?”

  Sheila didn’t notice the slight hesitation before the voice replied with a single terse word: “Yes.”

  “It’s my son,” Sheila went on. “Danny Harrar. That man Richard Kraven killed him, but the police didn’t do anything. They said he was just a drunken Indian, but that isn’t true. Danny was a good boy. He worked, and he went to school, and he never drank at all.” Sheila felt her eyes sting with tears, but she wiped them away with her sleeve, determined not to let her emotions get the better of her. Not this time. “All I want is to find my boy. All I want is to find my son so I can bury him.”

  Sheila heard a silence. Then the man spoke again. “And you want Anne to help you find him?”

  Sheila’s breath caught in her throat. He hadn’t hung up! “Do you think she would?” she asked, her voice trembling with anxiety. It had been so long since anyone had even listened to her that she could barely believe this man’s wife might actually be willing to help her.

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?” the man asked. “Just tell me what you think happened to your son, and how my wife can get in touch with you.”

  Suddenly, Sheila Harrar’s hands were shaking and a sheen of sweat covered her skin. Where should she start? What should she say? “He was going fishing,” she began. “With that man, Richard Kraven. I told the police, but they didn’t believe me, because I’m an In—” She hesitated, then took a deep breath. “The police never believe Native Americans,” she went on. “They say we’re all drunks, but that isn’t true. Danny wasn’t a drunk, and neither was I, not back then. But they didn’t believe me anyway.”

  “Just tell me what happened,” the man said. “Tell me everything you know and everything you think.”

  Speaking slowly and carefully, Sheila Harrar began to relate what she suspected had happened on the day Danny disappeared.

  And the man at the other end of the line listened.

  Listened, and remembered.…

  The sound of his own heartbeat throbbed so loudly in his ears that the Experimenter could barely believe it was audible to no one but himself. But who else would hear it?

  He was by himself, sealed alone into his private world.

  A mobile world made of metal and glass in which he was in total command, in utter control of his environment.

  Free to do anything he wanted, free to roam wherever his mood took him, free of all the distractions of the larger world beyond, in which he had little control at all.

  It was good to be alone.

  But soon he would be alone no longer, for through the windshield he saw what he’d been looking for.

  A boy—perhaps seventeen or eighteen—standing on the corner half a block ahead. A boy holding a fishing rod. Waiting for him.

  At the same time he began to slow the motor home to a gentle stop, the Experimenter also tried to slow his heartbeat But it was impossible: the thrill of anticipation was too much.

  But the boy wouldn’t notice—none of his subjects ever noticed.

  The vehicle came to a smooth and silent stop, and the door opened.

  The boy smiled at him, showing a double row of even teeth whose whiteness was accentuated by his bronze skin.

  The Experimenter smiled back, waving the boy into the motor home.

  “Where we going?” the boy asked.

  “The mountains,” the Experimenter replied. “I know a great spot along the Snoqualmie River.” Automatically he glanced around, but the streets were empty.

  No one had seen the motor home. No one had seen him.

  If anyone had seen the boy standing on the corner by himself, it wouldn’t matter.

  He drove the van carefully, seldom changing lanes, never exceeding the speed limit.

  In the seat beside him, the boy talked, just as all the other subjects had talked. But he found the boy much more interesting than most of the rest of them, for the boy was a Native American, though of what tribe the man wasn’t sure.

  “Did you know our people believe the first woman came from a fish?”

  The Experimenter shook his head.

  “It was a salmon,” the boy said. “And it must have been a big one, because when the man who caught it pulled it out of the river and tore it open, there was a woman inside.”

  “Tore it open?” the Experimenter asked, his heartbeat once more quickening as a thrill of excitement went through him.

  “Its belly,” the boy explained. “The man sliced the fish’s belly open to clean it, but instead of its guts coming out, the first woman came out. That’s why our people revere the salmon. Because it was from them that our own ancient mother came.”

  “And the man who cut the fish’s belly open?” the E
xperimenter asked, his voice betraying nothing of the excitement that stirred in his own belly. “What happened to him?”

  The dark-skinned boy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “In the legend, the only important thing is that the first woman emerged from the belly of a salmon. Sort of like Eve being created out of Adam’s rib, you know?”

  “But it wasn’t a man who opened Adam,” the Experimenter said. “It was God.”

  Again the boy shrugged.

  The Experimenter’s excitement grew.

  The city was behind him now, and the motor home was making its way up into the foothills. Fog closed in around them, fading the morning’s light to a colorless gray, and the world inside the van grew smaller, more private.

  The boy seemed to sense it. “It’s weird. It’s like there’s no one left in the whole world but us.”

  “Maybe there’s not,” the Experimenter suggested. “Maybe there’s never been anyone but us.”

  “Or maybe one of us doesn’t exist?” the boy asked, grinning as he picked up the thread of the postulation. “But which one of us is the figment of the other’s imagination?”

  The Experimenter said nothing, knowing that for himself, at least, the boy’s question had long ago been answered.

  Only he existed.

  All others were nothing more than subject matter for his experimentation.

  He slowed the motor home, scanning the fog-shrouded forest for the gap in the trees that marked the entrance to one of his favorite fishing holes. Finally he found what he was looking for, and turned into the narrow lane with the easy expertise born of repetition.

  The same easy expertise with which he now carried out his experiments.

  The vehicle bumped along the dirt track, and the Experimenter gently applied the brakes against the acceleration generated by the downhill slope. As the road leveled out, the trees gave way to a small clearing next to the river, which was, as he had known it would be, deserted.

  “I’ll make coffee,” the Experimenter told the boy. “By the time we’re done, the fog will have burned off and the fish will be feeding.”