Lila’s disembodied chuckle soothed him, for some reason. “No, Jonah. It means you’re working your way through this block. You’ve seen this part before. You’re not afraid of it. The balloons are a defense mechanism. They’ll appear when you get to the part you haven’t seen yet.
The door.
Jonah went to the front door, willing himself to fling it open and see what existed on the other side. Yet, for reasons he couldn’t identify, when his fingers touched the cold metal doorknob, he hesitated. The pause only lasted an instant, but a plump, seafoam green balloon materialized beside him.
“No,” Jonah murmured, and flung the door open.
The green balloons did not crowd out the scene this time, though a dozen or so did hover forebodingly in various places around the yard.
In front of him sat a mundane-looking porch. Made of white wooden planks, it extended out four feet from the door. Two concrete steps led down to cement path that connected porch and driveway through a sea of overgrown green grass.
A narrow white pillar stood to Jonah’s right and left, holding up the upper level.
“Jonah?” Lila’s voice snapped him from his reverie. He quickly described the scene for her. “What else do you see, Jonah? Look harder.”
For lack of a better plan, Jonah squinted and peered systematically from one side of the yard to another, looking for anything that might give him a clue to what it all meant.
Something materialized in his peripheral vision. It appeared so suddenly, Jonah jumped and gasped. The green balloons floating around the yard multiplied.
“What is it?” Lila’s voice sounded panicked. No doubt she thought he’d been confronted by a monster.
“It’s a…baby seat.”
A short pause. “A what?”
A baby car seat, Jonah thought the term was, though Lila would have no frame of reference for it. “A carrier seat for an infant. It’s sitting on the front porch.” Jonah moved toward it. The green balloons multiplied again, blocking out large portions of the yard now. A handful of them bobbed in the air above the porch, feet from Jonah.
Two seafoam green balloons were tied to the handle arching above the car seat. He felt sure these weren’t the same kind of balloons trying to block the scene out. These were part of the memory. He had no idea what made him certain.
He took another step toward it. More green balloons closed in on him. His heart pounded in his chest and he told it to relax.
A baby lay in the seat. Jonah couldn’t see its face because a partitioned, folding visor had been pulled forward to protect the child from the sun. Yet he saw its tiny, white hands gripping a bubblegum-pink blanket. The blanket churned and shifted as the baby kicked its feet beneath.
Jonah stepped forward again. Before his foot came fully down on the porch, a person appeared directly in front of him, so close he walked into the person’s elbow, which appeared directly in front of his nose. With a gasp, he stumbled backward and fell onto his butt. The crash didn’t sound nearly as loud as it should have. Jonah reminded himself he was a child in this memory.
“Jonah?” Lila said. “What’s happening? Are you okay?”
He looked, what felt like miles upward, into the kind face of his mother. She smiled down at him with a mixture of affection…and worry. Somehow, he didn’t think her worry was about his little fall.
A feeling of icy dread filled his chest.
Seafoam green filled his vision.
Balloons popped into existence at his shoulders and elbows, around his face. They filled every inch of the space around him, blocking out his mother’s worried expression.
Pain ratcheted up slowly in his head, as though a rubber band tightened around his brain with the appearance of each new balloon. He gasped and grabbed his head.
“Jonah?” Lila’s voice sounded closer and more frantic. “Jonah answer me! You need to come out of the sequence now.”
“More…pain,” Jonah whispered, though it was more pressure than pain. Something was wrong. This pain wasn’t only greater than the last time, it was different. Something was happening that hadn’t happened before.
“Jonah,” her disembodied voice fell directly into his ear. She must be standing directly beside him in the room back at Interchron. The soft weight of her fingers on his shoulder registered, feeling both close and far away.
The instant she touched him, she gasped. Then screamed.
Jonah ground his teeth together and clawed his way through the balloons—nothing to see except a wall of green now anyway—and out the memory.
He opened his eyes back into the room in Interchron, his hands raised above him in claws. He dropped them quickly. A sheen of sweat covered him from hair to ankles, and he felt like he’d run a marathon. The pressure, though it weighed less than in the memory, still pounded inside his temples, squeezing his skull ever tighter.
At first, he didn’t see Lila. The room stood empty except for him.
A soft whimper came from the ground beside his bed.
It took all his strength to heavy his legs over the side of the bed and peer down. Lila had fallen to her knees and now her forearms and forehead rested in the sand in front of her.
“Lila,” he gasped. “What…happening?”
He fell onto his knees in a heap in front of her. Grasping her forearms, he pushed her upright, so he could see her eyes.
They were…the word ‘cloudy’ came to mind. Paler than normal, and red-rimmed. “He’s coming, Jonah. He’ll take me again. I can feel him. I can’t stop it. We have to go get Doc. Or Maggie. Someone.”
Jonah didn’t think he’d be able to stumble across the cavern, much less through the twisting passages of Interchron. Before he could answer, Lila’s eyes changed again.
Yellow light rimmed her irises, shining out like a beacon, and her face went utterly still.
“Lila?” he whispered
She didn’t move or answer, and he wondered if she’d passed out with her eyes open.
When she spoke, her mouth moved, but no other part of her face did. Her voice came out deeper than it should have been. Much deeper. “No. Not Lila.” Jonah still heard Lila’s soft, feminine voice, but a man spoke with and over her.
Lila reached up with one hand and rested her second and middle fingers directly between his eyes. The pressure in his head reared so sudden and sharp, Jonah screamed. The pain blocked everything out.
The terrible energy yanked Maggie from a pleasant dream she’d never remember again. She vaulted into a sitting position in the dark beside Marcus, who’d done the same thing. Maggie’s heart threw itself against her rib cage and her breathing came raggedly.
A dark, heavy energy emanated from some other part of Interchron. She couldn’t identify it, but it filled her with cold chills and greasy foreboding. She reached out blindly and clutched Marcus’s forearm.
“Marcus.”
“I feel it.”
“What is it?”
“No idea.”
He threw the blanket back and swung his legs over the side of the bed. She followed suit. They dove into their clothes in record time and barreled out into the corridor together, where they nearly took out Karl, knocking him into the opposite wall.
The three of them straightened and stared at one another uncertainly. It was the middle of the night, and here they all stood blinking at one another as though it would help them figure out what the hell was going on.
“What is that?” Marcus asked, addressing Karl.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s B,” Maggie said, surprising herself. As the words came out, she knew they were true.
The two men stared at her with a mixture of surprise and worry.
“I don’t know how I know,” he said. “It…feels like him.”
“Like he’s here physically or some other way?” Karl asked.
Maggie shook her head. “I don’t—”
“He wouldn’t come here physically,” Marcus said shaking his head. “There�
��s no advantage to him. He’s more likely to do what he did before and…” he trailed off, looking like some realization had hit him.
Karl shared the look, and fear scurried across his face. “Lila,” he whispered.
Maggie whirled toward the door standing twenty feet down the hall from her and Marcus’s. The door to Jonah’s room. Jonah had not yet touched his neurochemical abilities, so he’d be less likely to feel or be awakened by the energy. Hurrying toward the door, something cold rose up along her spine as she realized it stood open several inches.
Not bothering to knock, she simply pushed it open. “Jonah?” Silence answered her. Though the bed wasn’t visible directly from the door, she saw its reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall. It stood empty.
Chills she couldn’t explain radiated out from her icy spine. She turned to find Marcus and Karl watching her. “Jonah’s not here.”
Marcus took the lead and half ran, half walked toward the source of the energy, in the heart of Interchron. Karl followed him and Maggie jogged to catch up.
As they sprinted through the quiet corridors, doors opened and people peered out, asking what was going on. Maggie barely registered them. Karl called over his shoulder at them to stay put for now and the team would investigate.
Doc joined them at some point, appearing up ahead and jogging along beside Marcus. Joan’s frightened voice came at Maggie’s shoulder. “I can’t find Lila.”
“Jonah’s missing too,” Maggie said grimly.
David appeared on her other side, joining them from an intersecting corridor. “It’s him,” he growled.
They reached the room together. The same one they’d worked in earlier when trying to get past Jonah’s block. Jonah knelt beside the same bed he’d sat in earlier. Lila stood over him, fingers pressed to his forehead in a scene Maggie found terrifyingly familiar. Maggie circumvented the rest of the group and ran toward Jonah.
“Maggie, wait!” Doc yelled. “Don’t touch them!”
Chapter 14: The Relevance of Belief
Karl hurried forward ahead of Maggie. Jonah sat on his knees, hands gripping his ears, eyes squeezed shut and face contorted in pain. Lila stood in front of him, her face a mask of smug triumph that was not her own. Her second and third fingertips rested against Jonah’s forehead.
Placing one hand on Jonah’s forehead, Karl grasped Lila’s wrist with the other and attempted to pry Lila’s fingers from Jonah’s head. He succeeded, but only by a few inches at a time. It obviously took all his strength.
When Lila’s fingers left Jonah’s forehead, a thin bar of white light appeared between the two. Karl would only pry her hand away by a few inches, and then it would snap back.
Maggie hadn’t seen the bar of light when it happened to her. She’d been in Jonah’s position, in too much pain to observe such details. Yet it looked exactly as the team described to her afterward. Maggie ran to Jonah, wanting to comfort him, or at least let him know she was there.
“Maggie, don’t!”
Maggie ignored Doc’s calls. She remembered too well the excruciating pain of B’s touch—like he’d fried her brain from the inside out—and now it was happening to her brother.
She ran up behind Lila, wrapping her arms around the taller woman from behind, and clasped both of her hands around Lila’s wrist, preparing to assist Karl by pulling Lila’s wrist straight back, away from Jonah. Perhaps Doc could then shear through the energy just as they’d done months ago when B attacked Maggie in this same manner.
Maggie’s palms met Lila’s wrists, and pain exploded in Maggie’s head. The world around her shattered like glass. It turned to sand and swirled around her like fog that just happened to have mass. Then it disappeared gone too. And Maggie found herself somewhere else entirely.
Maggie lunged forward…and pulled up short. The room she stood in looked circular. No corners, no flat walls, no door that she could see. The cylindrical walls were made of mirrors, or perhaps glass. It threw her reflection back at her, but she appeared murky, foggy somehow.
He came up behind her. She whirled to meet him. He looked…old didn’t cover it. More like ancient. His skin hung off his bones, but still held more wrinkles than she’d ever seen in one person. The lower lids of his sallow eyes hung down so far, she could see the red blood vessels of his eyeballs. Even they looked dry, shriveled. Tall and imposing, he moved with a dark grace.
“What do you want? She asked, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.
“Isn’t it obvious?” his voice came out a soft, sinister hiss.
“No,” she said warily.
“At last.” His voice didn’t sound at all like that of an old man. Deep, gravelly, and arrogant, it rumbled like thunder. “The Executioner. The key to all the prophecies has finally lunged, of her own volition, into one of my traps.”
“What’s going on?” Joan’s voice yelled.
“B has invaded Lila’s brain again,” Karl answered. “Maggie touched her and I think he’s got her too, now. Help me!”
Stepping back from the man, Maggie looked around her. Where were those voices coming from? Perhaps the team stood outside the round room, trying to find a way in? What were they talking about? Lila? A backlash? Lila wasn’t even part of the team. She hadn’t come with them on this mission.
Maggie moved to the perimeter of the room to explore the walls with her hands, thinking perhaps the door was simply invisible. No. She could sense no door with any of her five senses or her neurological ones. The walls felt like thick, cool glass, not something she could break with her hands. Something made her think her neurochemical abilities would be useless as well. Worth a shot, though. Gathering all the destructive energy she could toward her, she hurled it at the walls.
Not only did it have no impact, the energy didn’t even rebound as she would have expected. She might as well have tried to bulldoze a brick wall with a floor fan as break these glass ones with her energy.
“You cannot escape this room,” the old man said behind her. “It is attuned specifically to you.”
Maggie turned to look at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means I have designed it based around your particular brain chemistry. Others might be able to escape it. You, specifically, cannot.”
Something about the way the room felt to her, about the way her energy simply evaporated when it hit the wall, made her believe him. She turned fully to face him.
“Who are you?”
“My name is irrelevant,” the man said. “Just know that I have waited long to capture you.”
Bartholemew.
His eyes, boring into hers, made her want to shiver. She wouldn’t allow herself the weakness.
“So what now?” Maggie asked, refusing to let her voice quaver. “You’ll force me into the collective with all your other drones?”
He smiled and Maggie’s stomach turned.
“You have no idea how much pleasure it would give me to bend you to my will.” As he spoke, he walked slow circles around her. “But no. You are a threat to my power. The only threat. So,” he stood behind her now, and leaned in to whisper intimately into her ear, “I will eliminate you completely.” He straightened and moved around in front of her again. “I have waited a long time for this moment.”
Maggie snorted. “Yeah, it does look like you’ve been at this for a lot of years.”
“More than you could possibly imagine, my dear,” his pacing took him behind her again. “Yes, the phases of my plan move slowly. Now that I have you, they will speed up. Soon I will have all your rebellious friends under my thumb. They will serve me as drones. In fact, they will serve as drones to my drones.” He smiled chillingly. “Then I’ll turn my attention to the rest of the world. Every individual mind inhabiting every nook and fold of the world will be mine. So many of them believe if they simply don’t get involved, they can avoid me. How wrong they are.”
“Can we shear them apart, like we did before?” Karl shouted.
“There wil
l be a backlash,” the answer came in Doc’s voice. “It could cause damage. Too all three of them.”
Why could Maggie hear them? Ignoring the voices, she directed her words to B. “You’ll never capture Interchron. They’re too strong. They won’t allow it.” Maggie had no idea what the rest of what he’d said meant, so she latched on to the only thing that stood out to her.
“Ah, but I will,” he ceased his pacing directly in front of her and peered down into her face. He would probably have stood four or five inches taller than her. Old and stooped as he was, he only peered down from an inch or so above. “I have you, now, and all the information encased in that abominable head of yours.”
The fear must have shown on Maggie’s face, because the man’s smile widened. “You don’t know what I can do, do you? Johann hasn’t seen fit to tell you? Well, allow me to explain. I can sift through the contents of your mind, like separating solids from liquid through a sieve.” He reached out as if to touch her forehead and she cringed back. “I can extricate the information I want with a single touch. In truth, your physical death will be only a formality. Once I’ve finished with all my sorting, you’ll be nothing more than a pile of mush.”
Maggie’s sputtered. “You can’t…” Except he could. She glared up at him, anger flaring in her chest. “Why?”
The old man laughed. The deep, throaty sound put a chill in the air. He paced away from her in a straight line this time, stopped five feet away, keeping his back to her. “Will you be like all the rest, Executioner? Will you now spout your individualistic nobilities at me? Drivel about the people you love, the places you want to protect, how much you value your freedom? I’ve heard it all, and it will not move me.”
“Then I won’t tell you my story,” Maggie snapped. “Why don’t you tell me yours instead?”
He spun slowly to look at her, his face unreadable.
“Have you never loved anybody?” Maggie asked.
“Maggie! What’s happening? Maggie!”
Dark Matter (Interchron Book 3) Page 20
