by T. S. Mann
NEW ACQUAINTANCES
Matt twisted his head to avoid flying shards of glass and then turned back to look at the new arrival. The rider looked like something out of The Matrix, a femme fatale in white vinyl riding gear and a matching biker jacket with long black hair and opaque wraparound shades. As the bike blasted through the window and across the sanctuary, she leaned back and fell backwards off the seat into a graceful somersault that would have been implausible in a movie and should have been completely impossible in real life.
She landed comfortably on both feet and immediately brought her guns up to target Lindsay. But while part of Matt’s awareness marveled at the impossibility of her movements, another part – using senses he didn’t even have a name for – noticed a barely visible reddish haze shading the air around her, shaping and redirecting her speed and momentum according to her will.
This same energy shaded the bike as it continued its forward momentum, forcing Lindsay to dive for cover to avoid being squashed under its weight. As she did so, whatever force she exerted to keep Matt bound and Luke airborne evaporated, and the two brothers dropped to the ground. The bike also hit the ground, but more gracefully – it continued for another twenty feet before sliding to a stop. Distracted by his fall, Matt did not even notice the final absurdity, as the bike activated its own kick stand and effectively parked itself next to the wall.
As the woman in white carefully rounded on her with the twin pistols, Lindsay calmly rose from her prone position. If she had any concerns about this new development other than annoyance over the indignity of diving for cover, she did not reveal them.
“Electra, dah-ling! I wish I’d known you were coming. I’d have prepared something special for you.”
“More special than a beyonder, Lindsay? Don’t bother on my account.” The newcomer slowly edged around the room to get a clearer shot at Lindsay. “By the way, do you remember me saying last time that I’d see you dead if we ever crossed paths again.”
Lindsay gave a mocking sneer. “Girlfriend, please. I know you think you’re intimidating in your Milla Jovovich cosplay get-up, but we both know that you’re not up killing me. Least of all with those ridiculous guns you’re waving about.”
“I didn’t say ‘kill you,’ I said ‘see you dead.’ In case you haven’t noticed, my entrance trashed your veils.”
Lindsay turned sharply towards the shattered window and then glared at Electra, who continued.
“Every Stranger in Boston probably knows you just tried to summon something from the Beyond in here. I’d say you have about five minutes before the Blade arrives, and I’m pretty sure they have the firepower to take you out.”
Lindsay chuckled darkly. “You sneaky bitch, you. Alrighty then, I guess I’d better collect my new boytoys and skidaddle!”
Electra shifted targets. Now, she was pointing one Desert Eagle at Matt, who had just struggled clumsily to his feet, and the other at Luke, who had made it up as far as one knee and who still seemed delirious.
“No more ‘apprentices,’ Lindsay. I’ll see your boytoys dead before I let you take them with you.”
Matt swallowed hard at the thought that his “rescuer” might be as eager to kill him as Lindsay was.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on there! We’re not with her! We’re the victims here!”
“Shut up!” said Electra without ever taking her eyes from Lindsay.
“Listen, just let me get my brother, and we’ll get out of here. Then, you two can do whatever the hell you want with one another.”
“I said shut up!” Electra spared a glance at Matt and then immediately cursed for having broken her concentration. A fraction of a second was all Lindsay needed. When Electra returned her gaze to the spot where Lindsay had stood, it was empty. Lindsay was ten feet away, directly behind Luke with a hand on his shoulder.
“Whoops,” she said with a saucy grin. “Made you blink! Pazuzu!”
And with that, Lindsay and Luke exploded into a massive cloud of black flies which buzzed angrily past Electra and Matt before pouring out the open window.
“Luke!!!” Matt raced to the shattered window, but the cloud of flies, or whatever it was, had already vanished into the night. He bowed his head and squeezed his eyes tight in frustration, before whispering his brother’s name again. “Luke. I’m sorry.”
Then, he felt the cold touch of a gun barrel at the base of his skull.
“Listen to me very, very, very, very carefully,” the woman said coldly. “I wasn't bluffing earlier. In about three minutes, some people are going to show up here to clean up this mess, and if you’re still here when they arrive, they will most likely chop off your head. If your luck is as bad as it seems to be, they'll do something worse. If you want to live, let alone have any chance of saving your brother, you will get your pants on, collect your things, and get your ass on the back of my bike within the next thirty seconds.”
The gun barrel moved away, and Matt turned to look at the woman, who was already walking back towards the waiting Silverbird, holstering her guns as she went. Despite his fear, he suddenly felt hope again.
“So we can still save him?”
She didn’t even look back. “Not if you keep gawking like a slapped imbecile.”
Matt took the hint and raced back to where his clothes were. He dressed quickly, somewhat surprised that at no point had he pissed himself from terror. He spared a glance at the clothes Luke had left behind. On impulse, he grabbed Luke’s coat and put it on. Curiously, the trench coat seemed to fit perfectly, despite the obvious size difference between the two brothers. He quickly raced over to where the woman and her bike were waiting.
“My name’s Matt. Matt Sullivan.”
“Awesome. Never tell anyone your real name again. I’m Electra Dellamorte.”
He took a second to process that and then got on the bike. “Is that your real name?”
“No.” Electra kicked the Silverbird to life, and Matt got on behind her. After a second’s hesitation, he gingerly put his arms around her waist and then quickly tightened his grip as she put the bike in gear and turned it towards the front doors of the church.
Then, she gunned it and took off fast, popping a wheelie as she rammed the doors and blasted them from their hinges. Matt squeezed a bit tighter and closed his eyes, amazed that this little stunt wasn’t even in the top three most frightening things to happen tonight. The bike flew down the walkway and into the street, gaining speed as it went.
They were only a few blocks down when Matt felt Electra’s body tense, and over the sound of the motor, he made out a soft curse. He looked over her shoulder and saw three black SUVs racing down Dorchester in their direction. The first two passed without incident, but the third slammed on its brakes and swung into a hard U-turn as they flew by. Sparing a glance behind him, Matt could see nothing through the SUV’s tinted windows.
“Hold on!” he heard Electra yell out as she gunned the Silverbird even faster. A few seconds later but at least four blocks down, and with the SUV rapidly gaining, Electra made what felt like an impossible ninety-degree turn into a narrow alley.
“Give me your hand,” she yelled, and Matt, swallowing hard, released his right hand and thrust it forward. She grabbed it with her own. He could barely make out what sounded like Latin from his savior, but her next words were clearer.
“You have to get off! I’ll lead them away and double back for you! Just keep out of sight!”
“You want me to jump?!?”
“No, I want you to fly high!”
With that, she released his hand. Matt saw, or rather sensed, another flash of brilliant red light. Then, his stomach crawled down into his shoes, as all his forward momentum, gained from riding a racing bike in its top gear, somehow changed into vertical momentum. Instantly, he shot off the back seat like a rocket. Higher and higher he flew, screaming like a little girl the whole way. Beneath him, he could see the Silverbird accelerate even faster, followed by the SUV which passed underneath him.
His flight carried him up, five hundred feet, a thousand feet, more. He looked to his left and thought, ridiculously, “Shit, I really can see my house from here!” Then, his upward momentum slowed, stopped ... and reversed. From a height of at least a quarter-mile, Matt began to fall towards the street below.
As the ground rushed towards him, Matt struggled to stay calm and desperately looked around for some way to slow his fall. Then, he saw it – a faint, reddish haze pouring off his body that he could somehow see only out of the corner of his eye. And through some strange intuition, he knew that color was somehow associated with control over moving things … and people.
“Red!” he thought urgently. “Red means motion! Okay, think red! Think red, dammit! Red means stop!”
He did ... and his body shuddered at the impact. But not with the ground, Matt realized as he opened his eyes. He was suspended mid-air, perhaps 500 feet above the alleyway, covered in an aura that was now a mixture of red and gold. Hardly daring to breathe, Matt felt around for the edges of whatever invisible platform he had landed on, but he soon realized that there wasn’t one. He had simply ... stopped falling. Or rather, he had stopped until he suddenly realized how impossible such a stop was, at which point he immediately began falling again.
“Aaaaaahhhh! Red light! Red light! Red light!” And then he stopped again, just as forcefully, this time even with the rooftops, still fifty feet or so above the ground. Glancing around quickly, Matt noticed a fire escape on the building to his left, complete with an extendable ladder, about fifteen feet away.
“Okay, listen up. I want to fall that way!” he said, pointing at the ladder. And with a brighter flash of golden energy, he did just that, falling headfirst from a “height” of fifteen feet into the metal structure. Matt cursed loudly as he banged his head on the ladder. Instantly he wrapped his arms and legs around it.
Feeling safe for the first time in hours, Matt exhaled deeply. As he did, the faint glow which had illuminated his path faded, and gravity fully reasserted itself. Matt yelled yet again, as his weight caused the ladder to give way and slide down. When it reached its lowest point, Matt lost his grip and fell the rest of the way to the ground with a crash and a thud. After a few long minutes, he pulled himself up and checked himself for injuries: a twisted ankle, some bruised ribs, a general loss of dignity. He looked back up into the night sky from which he had originally fallen.
“Well, any landing you can walk away from ....”
Then, once his breathing had slowed, he remembered what he had seen on his upward journey. The apartment was only six or seven blocks from here. Shaking off his sore ankle – “Walk it off, Sullivan!” Coach would have bellowed – he took off in the direction of home. Even if his mom wasn’t there, he could call her at work and together they would figure out what to do.
Fifteen minutes later, Matt reached his apartment building, a three-story complex in what his mother liked to call an upper-lower class neighborhood – still nice, but close enough to the slums to necessitate bars on the windows and a keypad entry system. Matt punched in the code, darted through the door and up the stairs, and slipped his key into the lock on Apartment 2C.
It wouldn’t turn. Matt stood still for a moment, trying to control his racing heartbeat.
“Jesus, what next?!?” he thought.
Hanging on the door was a wreath of fake dead flowers with a wooden cut-out of a witch and a banner reading “Happy Halloween.” Matt’s mom loved that kind of kitschy stuff; an entire closet of the tiny apartment was devoted to her collection of decorations for every holiday. But it was functional as well, for on the back of each of her seasonal door wreaths was a little magnetic plate to which a spare key could be attached.
For years, Matt and Luke had complained about her leaving a spare key in case one of them ever needed it. They weren’t little kids anymore, and besides, it was dangerous to leave a spare key out where somebody could find it. But on this night, Matt was suddenly grateful for his mother’s overprotectiveness. He felt behind the wreath and took the key.
But he didn’t just rush in. The fact that his own key suddenly didn’t work worried him. He compared the two, and the one he took from the wreath was obviously newer, much newer than the one his mom had been hiding there since he was ten. Cautiously, he fit the key into the door and turned it. The door opened, and he slipped quietly into the apartment.
The apartment door opened into a living room with an attached dining area that he knew like the back of his hand. Except for the hat stand he bumped into in the dark, which nearly scared him into crying out. That was new. Matt swallowed and flipped the light switch. The room had changed completely from earlier that evening. He recognized about half the furniture, but even that had all been rearranged. The rest was new and looked much nicer than his mom could have afforded.
The mantle board still held all the family pictures, but it seemed to be someone else’s family. He moved over to examine the pictures. One was a black-and-white photo of his mother’s late parents taken when they were newlyweds back in the 1960's. Another was a picture of his mother, Ellie Sullivan, in a wedding dress ... standing next to some burly guy in a tuxedo who was emphatically not John Sullivan. Matt didn’t recognize anyone else in the photos, and there were no pictures of him, of Luke, or of their father.
“Freeze!”
Matt jumped at the command. He was so caught up in the pictures that he didn’t even notice someone enter the living room. And speak of the devil, it was the very same man from the pictures. He looked a few years older and wore a t-shirt and pajama bottoms instead of a tux, but it was definitely him.
The guy had Matt covered with a snub-nosed revolver that he seemed to handle pretty confidently, and seeing him in person jogged Matt’s memory. His name was Brad Something-or-other. His mom had introduced them at John Sullivan’s funeral. Apparently, Brad had been friends with Matt’s parents when they were in high school together but had lost touch. It certainly looked like he’d gotten back in touch now.
“Whoa, man, take it easy.”
“Quiet! And put your hands up! Ellie, call 911!”
Matt complied ... until his mother stepped into the room, clutching her bathrobe tightly and standing close behind this Brad guy. He took a step forward.
“Mom?”
Brad Something-or-other cocked the hammer of the pistol and moved to stay between Matt and his mother. “Get back, kid, or I swear I will shoot you right now.”
Matt ignored him and focused on his mother who seemed not to know him. “Mom, it’s me. Matt. Remember? Your son?”
She looked at him without a hint of recognition and then turned to the man with the gun in confusion. “Is he high or crazy?”
“I dunno. Let the cops figure it out. Kid, you just keep your mouth shut. Get on the ground and keep your hands where I can see them.”
Matt had had enough. Too much had happened already just to accept that his own mother didn’t even recognize him.
“No! You shut up and let me talk to her, dammit!”
As he said the words and framed the command in his mind, Matt felt a tingle at the base of his skull, like the one he had felt in the alley. A strange heat haze, blue now instead of either red or gold materialized around the other man’s head. Immediately, he dropped the gun to the floor and seemed to go rigid. His mouth moved, but no words came forth. The only other movement was in his eyes, which darted about madly in fear over his sudden loss of self-control. The woman was startled by the man’s sudden paralysis, and she shook him for several seconds.
“Brad? Brad? What’s wrong with you?” Then, she turned on Matt with a fearful expression and dropped to the floor to pick up the gun. “What did you do to my husband?!?”
“Wait!” Matt held his hand out towards his mother. “Just listen to me, please!” This time, Matt could see the blue haze more clearly as it emanated from his hand and settled around his mother’s head. She froze and turned to look up at him, but she didn’t let go o
f the gun. For a second, Matt hesitated, afraid that his mysterious new powers might have harmed her in some way. Then, he decided to risk it. He moved closer and knelt on the ground in front of his mother.
“Your name is Ellie Sullivan. You used to be married to John Sullivan. He died about eight years ago in a car crash. You and he had two boys, twins, named Matthew and Luke. Do you remember ... any of this?” He looked at her pleadingly, but her expression was one of fear mixed with anger.
“My name was Ellie Sullivan, and I was married to John Sullivan,” she responded coldly. “But we never had children. I was pregnant with twins a few years after we married, but I had a miscarriage and lost them both. John took to drink and left me, and after he died in a car wreck, I remarried. My name is Ellie Collins.”
Her voice rose in intensity and a wild look entered her eyes.
“Now, whoever you are, GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!”
Matt didn’t move. He blinked a few times and bit his lower lip to stop it from trembling. Then, he looked more closely at the blue haze which surrounded Ellie and Brad Collins. He wondered if perhaps he could make it stronger, if he could use it to make her remember him. But no. He didn’t know what he was doing, what he was becoming, and right now, he was like a blind man playing around with a chainsaw. Matt stood and stepped back to where he could see them both. Perhaps there was one thing he could risk doing.
“Listen to me, both of you. This is just a dream. It’s not real. I want you to put the gun back where it belongs and go back to bed. Forget I was ever here.” Ellie rose, and then she and Brad turned and walked stiffly back towards the bedroom. While Matt couldn’t actually see the blue energy altering their memories, he intuitively sensed that it was doing so. He also sensed, like a gut punch, that whatever he did was particularly effective on his mother because she desperately wanted to forget that she had ever seen him!
Matt walked slowly back to the door, pausing to listen for the sounds of Brad and Mary Collins getting back into bed. Then, he opened the door, flipped off the light, and locked the door behind him. Outside, he replaced the spare key behind the wreath and then traced his finger across the “Happy Halloween” lettering.
