Black Lightning

by John Saul

  Her exhaustion evaporating, she brought up the index that listed all the interviews she’d conducted over the years, but her momentary excitement faded as she gazed at its statistics.

  There were 1,326 files in five subdirectories.

  Even those would take days to review.

  But she could break them down. No need to go through the interviews with friends and families of the victims.

  Only the ones with Richard Kraven’s associates were important now. Her fingers tapped on the keys, bringing up a new subdirectory.

  The 1,326 files had been culled down to only 127.

  Pulling up the first file, Anne set to work.

  She would find it. Sooner or later, she would find it.

  But until she did, how many more people would die?

  And who would they be?

  CHAPTER 54

  A dim point of light, so faint as to be barely visible at all, slowly began to penetrate the darkness that had closed around Glen Jeffers’s mind. Feeling as if he were emerging from a deep sleep, Glen focused on the light, willing it to brighten and wash away the blackness that surrounded him.

  Now he could hear a faint sound as well—a high-pitched keening.

  The inky black fog in his mind slowly faded into gray, and the point of light spread.

  The sound grew clearer.

  A drill. A dentist’s drill?

  Glen struggled to remember what had happened. He’d been at home. In the kitchen, reading the paper. The phone! That was it—the phone had rung.

  Gordy Farber. It had been Gordy, calling to find out how he was doing. They’d talked for a moment, and then something had interrupted him.

  The doorbell.

  Someone had come to the door, and he’d gone to answer it, and …

  The blackness had closed around him.

  The sound grew louder, and the light spread further. It was brightening more quickly now.

  You’re awake. The voice wasn’t loud, but although the keening sound was growing steadily more insistent as the blackness continued to fade, Glen could hear the words perfectly. It was almost as if they emanated from somewhere within his own head. It was I who woke you, the voice went on. Just as it was I who put you to sleep.

  Why? The question formed soundlessly in Glen’s mind, but even before he could form it into an audible word, the voice answered it.

  I needed our body.

  Our body. The words stripped away the last of the fog that had gathered around Glen’s mind. Our body. What the hell was going on? With the question still half formed in his mind, pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place.

  The hours he had lost.

  The broken shaver about which he’d made up a story—a story that had then turned out to be at least partly true.

  The things that had appeared in the house—objects that he assumed he’d bought, even though he had no memory of doing so: the fishing rod Kevin found, the new shaver he himself found. The fishing fly that could have been made of a feather from Hector and some fur from Kumquat.

  Kumquat!

  Now he remembered the dream. But it had only been a dream! It hadn’t been real—it couldn’t have been.

  Once again the words the voice had spoken echoed in his head: Our body.

  Not our body, Glen thought desperately. It’s my body. There wasn’t anyone else—couldn’t be anyone else. Whatever was happening had to be in his own mind. That was it—he was still waking up, and his mind was playing tricks on him! But now more memories were coming back to him. Making love to Anne the day he’d come home from the hospital. Something had happened that afternoon. He’d felt … what? Something odd, almost like another presence inside him.

  Waking up in the hospital to find all of Anne’s files on Richard Kraven piled on the table beside his bed.

  The blackouts …

  Now he remembered something he’d watched on television—a woman who’d claimed to have eighteen different personalities living inside her. Multiple personality syndrome. The woman had first begun to worry because she was having blackouts. And then she heard about things she’d done. Things she couldn’t remember. Things she knew she never would have done—

  The keening sound was louder than ever, and now that he could hear it clearly, Glen knew it wasn’t a drill at all.

  It was a saw.

  He could see the blade now. It was right in front of him. He could see his hand holding the blue-green plastic handle of a Makita saw. And beyond the saw was something else.

  The upper part of a woman’s torso. A heavy woman, whose large, pendulous breasts drooped toward either side, pulling away from each other under no more impetus than their own weight.

  Between the woman’s breasts, running from a few inches above her navel all the way up to the base of her throat, there was a cut.

  A clean, fresh incision, perfectly straight.

  The woman’s chest expanded as she drew a deep breath of air into her lungs.

  The keening whine subsided as the saw stopped.

  Glen watched in disbelief as his hand put the saw down and picked up a knife. A sharp X-Acto knife, like the one Kevin had used when he was working on the model ship.

  The one he’d used when he was tying the fishing fly.

  Glen watched numbly as his hands moved as if under their own volition. The knife traced a line across the woman’s torso, intersecting the existing incision at its base. As the knife slid easily through the woman’s skin, a line of red appeared in its wake, a line that thickened, then began to lose its shape as the blood welled from the cut and covered her body.

  Transfixed, Glen gazed helplessly at what he was doing.

  His hands moved again, and a third incision appeared, this one nearly spanning the space between her shoulders.

  No! Glen thought. This can’t be happening! But even as his mind formulated the thought, dark, mocking laughter echoed in his head. Trying to stifle the taunting sound, Glen willed himself not to move his hands again, struggled to halt their inexorable motion. But now he felt something else—a terrible paralysis, robbing him of will, erasing his power over his own body. As he watched helplessly, his fingers went to work, deftly laying back the folds of skin as easily as they might have opened a pair of double doors.

  Beneath the skin, clearly visible now, was the woman’s sternum.

  Even as his hands reached for it, Glen’s mind grasped the purpose of the Makita. His fingers squeezed the switch and instantly his ears were filled with the keening whine of the whirling blade.

  As the blade, no more than a silvery blur now, moved closer to the woman’s sternum, Glen struggled to wrest control of his body from the force that seemed to have seized it. Powerless, he saw the blade descend. Then the teeth dug into the mass of bone and cartilage that formed the ventral support of the woman’s rib cage.

  Glen tried to scream out against the carnage he was witnessing, but his voice would obey him no more than his fingers and hands. No, he whimpered silently to himself. Oh, God, no. Don’t let this happen.

  But even as he made his plea, the spinning blade dug deeper and his hand inexorably laid the woman’s torso open, splitting her sternum, ripping through the pleural membrane.

  As his eyes focused on the mass of tissue that were the woman’s lungs, the darkness closed in on Glen once more.

  This time he welcomed it.

  CHAPTER 55

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jeffers, but Dr. Farber is with a patient.”

  The nurse’s tone over the phone made Glen wonder if he was being deliberately punished for hanging up on the doctor earlier. “Can’t you at least tell him who it is?”

  “Doctor does not like to be interrupted,” the nurse replied in a voice that made it crystal clear she was annoyed with him. “And you don’t have to shout, Mr. Jeffers. I’m not deaf, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Glen said. Once again he tried to remember what had happened when he’d been talking to Gordy Farber this morning. They’d been in
the middle of setting up an appointment when suddenly he’d had another of his blackouts. This one had come on him fast, and when he’d awakened this time, he found himself on the living room sofa. Though he hadn’t felt ill, he hadn’t felt rested, either. Certainly not as rested as he should have felt if he’d slept through all the hours that were missing from his day.

  There were the usual memories of dreams, too, but unlike yesterday, these weren’t merely fragments. They were great cohesive chunks, and as vivid as normal memories.

  “Is it an emergency?” the nurse asked, sounding only somewhat mollified.

  Glen hesitated. He was scared, more scared than he wanted to admit, at least to the nurse. But was it really an emergency? He wasn’t sure.

  The memory of the dream flashed back into his mind, as clear now as when he’d awakened a few minutes ago. In the dream, he’d “awakened,” too, opening his eyes to discover he was no longer in his own house or any other familiar surrounding, but standing in a stream, stark naked, with a fly rod in his hands and no memory at all of how he’d gotten there.

  Like a dream within a dream.

  The only memory he had—if it even was a genuine memory—was of cutting open a woman’s chest. And that image had been vivid, too, not at all like the fuzzy half-obscured flashes he’d had before.

  In the dream, he’d reeled in the fish line and scrambled out of the stream, hurrying to a motor home parked in the middle of a flat grassy area a couple of hundred feet from the stream’s edge.

  Though he had no memory of where the vehicle had come from, it nevertheless seemed familiar. His heart had begun pounding as he neared the van, but when he went inside, nothing was amiss. There certainly was no sign of anything like the hideous butchery he could also clearly remember. In one of the compartments in the vehicle’s undercarriage, he found a Makita saw, its blade removed. In one of the galley drawers he found a handle for an X-Acto blade, but again there was no blade attached to it. He could find no signs of blood anywhere in the motor home, but after putting on his clothes—the same clothes he was wearing now, as he talked to Gordy Farber’s nurse—he’d searched the woods surrounding the grassy clearing.

  He’d found nothing.

  He’d been on his way back to the motor home when he blacked out again.

  “Mr. Jeffers?” the nurse asked. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Glen replied. “And it is an emergency. I really need to talk to Gordy.”

  The nurse hesitated, as if trying to decide if he was lying, then apparently decided to let her employer make the decision for himself. “I’ll see if the doctor can be disturbed.”

  Tinny Muzak dribbled from the speaker for a moment, then Gordy Farber’s voice came on the line. “Glen? Where are you? What’s going on? How come you hung up on me?”

  “Can I come in and see you?” Glen asked. “I can be there as soon as you have some time open.”

  “I’ll make the time,” Gordy Farber told him, reading the fear in Glen’s voice. “Can you get here in fifteen minutes?”

  “I’ll be there,” Glen replied.

  It was actually only ten minutes later that Glen walked into the doctor’s office. It would have been less, but as he set off to walk the eight blocks down to the hospital complex, he’d seen a motor home just like the one in the dream. He peered into its windows, and his heart had raced as he recognized what little of the interior he could see. He tried the doors, found them locked, and only then continued on to Group Health and Farber’s office.

  The heart specialist insisted on a thorough examination despite Glen’s protests, then, satisfied that his patient wasn’t on the verge of a second attack, he gestured Glen to a chair and rested his own weight against his big walnut desk, arms crossed, eyeing the seated man carefully. Whatever had occasioned Glen’s worried phone call, it didn’t appear to be a medical emergency; in fact, from all signs, it appeared as if Glen’s physical recovery was proceeding satisfactorily. “So,” he asked, “what is this all about, Glen?”

  “I don’t know,” Glen replied.

  Gordy Farber stared at him. “You don’t know?” he echoed. “What the hell kind of answer is that? You were making an appointment. The doorbell rang, and then you came back, were barely civil to me, and hung up. So don’t tell me you don’t know. Who was at the door?”

  Glen shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “I remember talking to you, and I remember the doorbell ringing. After that, the whole day is a mess. I woke up on the sofa twenty minutes ago, but I don’t think I was there all day. But it’s all crazy. I have this memory of waking up earlier, but that time I wasn’t even in the house. I was standing in a stream up in the mountains. I was fishing.” He reddened and his eyes shifted away from the doctor. “And I was stark naked.” Slowly and carefully, Glen repeated everything he remembered. When he was finally finished, he looked up at the doctor, fear blazing in his eyes. “The thing is, I’m starting to wonder what’s real and what’s a dream. My God, Gordy, what’s happening to me? And don’t try to tell me this is something that normally happens after a heart attack.”

  The specialist moved around his desk and dropped into his chair. “You don’t have any memory of driving up to the mountains, or driving back?”

  Glen shook his head. “I don’t even have a motor home. But the weird thing is, the one in my dream, or whatever it was, is parked half a block from my house. I just have the two memories—cutting up the woman, and then looking for her body in the motor home.”

  “Obviously, you didn’t do either of those things,” Farber told him.

  “What if I did?” Glen countered.

  Farber frowned, then switched on the intercom. “Could you bring in this morning’s Herald, please?” he asked his nurse. “The front page.” A moment later the door opened and the woman appeared, a folded newspaper in her hand. When Farber nodded toward Glen, she handed it to him.

  “Will that be all?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Farber replied. As the nurse closed the door behind her, he turned back to Glen. “Take a look at the front page.” Glen unfolded the paper to see Anne’s story on the murder of Rory Kraven spread across the lower half of page one. “Did you read that this morning?” the doctor asked. Glen nodded. “Then I think we can identify the source of that dream,” Farber observed, a thin smile curving his lips. “Come on, Glen—that story doesn’t just talk about what happened to the guy they found across the street. It describes what he did to those two women, too. And one thing you can say for your wife—when she draws you a verbal picture, it’s vivid. So if you read that article this morning, and dreamed about cutting open a woman’s chest this afternoon, I don’t think it’s rocket science to find a connection between the two events.”

  Glen shook his head doggedly. “But it doesn’t account for the blackouts. And what was I doing fishing in the nude?”

  Gordy Farber grinned. “It was only a dream, Glen, remember? Hell, if it had been my dream, I might have been tempted to try it myself.” When his attempt to lighten Glen’s mood was only met by a dark look, Farber’s smile faded. “All right, I admit it’s a weird dream. But it’s also way out of my field. The kind of stuff you’re talking about, you need a shrink for. Want me to call someone?”

  Glen hesitated. The image of the woman’s torso—and his own hands cutting into it, first with the X-Acto knife, then with the Makita—filled his mind. “Do you know someone good?” When the heart specialist nodded, he made up his mind. “Set me up.”

  Jake Jacobson was ten years younger than Glen, five inches shorter, and forty pounds heavier. By the time Glen arrived in Jacobson’s office, the psychiatrist had already pulled his medical history from the central computer, and as his new patient came in the door, the doctor looked at him critically. “Well, at least you don’t look crazy,” he offered in an attempt to put Glen at his ease.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Glen asked.

  “If you don’t want me to
make you feel better, why did you come?” Jacobson countered.

  For the next half hour he listened while Glen related as much as he could remember about his state of mind since he’d had the heart attack, and especially the strange, surreal experiences of the past few days. The psychiatrist took some notes, but didn’t interrupt Glen’s story until he had finished.

  “The human mind is a very complex organ,” Jacobson observed when Glen at last fell silent. “We already know that a very simple suggestion can implant false memories that are every bit as vivid as genuine ones. We’re seeing it all the time in alleged child sex-abuse cases. I don’t question your belief that what you remember about this afternoon is real. All I question is the validity of that belief.” He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his ample belly. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume the experience in the river was real. You yourself were unable to find any evidence of what you think you did.” He smiled. “A saw and a knife, neither of them with a blade?”

  “I could have thrown them away anywhere,” Glen said, his voice obstinate. “I didn’t even look for them.”

  “But you did look for a body, and didn’t find one. Nor did you find any blood, or any sign of a struggle, or anything else that might rationally lead you to believe you’d actually killed someone. It was all a dream, Glen. As for the motor home, obviously you saw it at some point this morning. You probably even looked in the windows earlier, so when you had the dream, the images were already in your mind.” He began ticking points off on his fingers. “Your next-door neighbor was murdered in a manner not unlike what you dreamed. There is a motor home like the one you dreamed of, sitting almost in front of your house. Your wife has been writing about Richard Kraven for years, and one of the things I remember about him is that he liked to go on fishing trips in a motor home. I can’t believe that little fact isn’t buried somewhere in your subconscious, too. What you’ve done is put all that material together into a single vivid, pseudomemory of an event for which you admit you could find no physical evidence whatsoever.”