by T. S. Mann
A chorus of bass drums pounding an irregular rhythm turned out to be the heartbeats of the other people in the building. He had only to wonder about how many heartbeats he was hearing when the magic itself supplied the answer: nine living persons in this complex, including himself. He refined his senses to tune out that sound, and he focused on other noises.
A droning, static hum from a large room somewhere with lots of TV screens. The soft whir of the mechanisms within Bryce’s enchanted drink machine. A rock song playing softly through headphones – Reptillia by The White Stripes. Then, he made out two people talking, one of whom sounded like Bryce.
Pleased with himself, he raised his hand for a mudra and prepared a second spell that would let him project his voice to Bryce’s location. But before he could, he froze, lowered his hand ... and listened.
A few minutes earlier…
Widget returned to the Panopticon from some errands to find her husband back on the couch in front of the big screen. He was no longer studying satellite footage of Boston. Instead, he was studying football highlights from SportsCenter. She sat down beside him on the couch.
“No luck with the Cult of Mammon?”
“Nope.” Bryce kept his eyes glued to the screen as he took another swig of beer.
“Mm-hmm. I can’t help but notice that you’re drinking beer with your biotic shield switched off. I’m not sure that’s a particularly mature response to the situation.”
“Well, you know me. Immature Frat Boy Bryce, who’s afraid to grow up.”
Widget hesitated. Was that the problem?
“Bryce, if this is about having kids, I just mentioned it to see what you thought. I’ve never pressured you about that, not in all the time we’ve been married. We have all the time in the world to decide about starting a family.”
Bryce raised the beer to his lips, looked at it, and then put it down again without drinking.
"It's not that. I'm just frustrated over this whole situation with the kid and his brother. "
Then, he took his wife's hand gently, and she sat down on the couch next to him.
“And don't get me wrong ... I do want kids. Hell, I wanted kids when we first got married. But after what happened with Doc....” He turned to look at his wife. “I don’t mind growing old with you, Widget, but I would prefer to stay young and good-looking with you for as long as possible. I’m afraid that if having children does age us, I might resent them for it, and I don’t want to feel that way. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re a disappointment to your father, and I don’t want that for my own children.”
Widget moved closer and snuggled against him. She was a bit worried about what she had to tell him but felt he needed to know.
“Bryce, honey, I’m afraid ... I’m afraid you’re probably going to be growing up pretty soon whether we have kids or not.”
He frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Doc. He’ll be leaving us before too long.”
Bryce sat up straighter. “Leaving Boston?”
“Leaving Earth. Leaving the Infrastructure.” She bit her lip and then let it all out. “Doc has been communing with the Bodhisattva. Well ... he doesn't call it that, but the terminology doesn't really matter. He’s trying to reach the sixth level of attunement. If he does, his connection to the Superstructure will be too strong for him to safely remain in this world for any length of time.
“That’s why he’s been so off his game for the past few weeks, why he’s been so snippy and absent-minded. And also, why he’s had you take over a lot of his spell-work here at the campus. He’s got his mind partitioned in eight different ways, with seven of them linked together as a super-processor. He’s trying to jam about fifty years of questing for enlightenment into six weeks.”
“Is that also why he’s getting zap-happy with his mind control spells?”
“Ah, the boy. I haven’t seen him yet. How bad is it?”
Bryce shook his head. “Kinda disturbing actually. At least three behavioral mods, including one big one that has his fear and anxiety centers shut down almost completely. Basically, Doc just has to suggest a course of action, and Matt does what he’s told like a well-trained puppy. And then, he thanks Doc for the suggestion and for all the help we’ve given.”
He scoffed. “Like we’ve actually done anything to help him. We’re no closer to finding Lindsay now than we were before she came to town.”
Widget said nothing. She just rested her head on her husband’s chest and closed her eyes. There was nothing more to say.
There was also nothing more for Matt to hear. Back in the gym, the boy stepped away from the door in disbelief, his thoughts in turmoil.
“Nah. Couldn’t be. Doc would never ....” His voice trailed off.
In a daze, he turned back into the room and walked unsteadily across the court. Then, he looked up and saw his reflection once again in the mirror. He walked up to within ten feet of it and tentatively held up his hand.
“Show me.”
His reflection practically lit up, awash in brilliant blue energy. Matt could see the behavioral modification spells Bryce had spoken off. To Matt, they looked like glowing blue rods that had been driven into his head like railroad spikes. Out of each came a spider web of glowing blue veins that worked their way down his head and underneath his shirt.
Matt put his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes.
“No. There must be some reason. He wouldn’t have done that to me without a good reason.”
But when he opened his eyes again, he could see the blue rods flashing with the cadence of the thoughts running through his head, and he knew that even that rationalization was the product of the spells placed upon him. He clenched his teeth, put his hands on his head, and steeled himself to try dispelling the magic.
“Be free!” he intoned.
Juice flowed through him, a considerable amount he thought, and one after another, the three rods shattered and disappeared. The blue veins slowly faded away. At first, Matt felt no different at all. Then, like a thunderbolt, it hit him. He dropped to his knees and puked violently for several minutes as suppressed emotions washed over him like flood waters pouring over a burst dam.
Post-traumatic stress over his own ordeal. Terrible, crippling anxiety over his brother’s fate. Anger at how he had been manipulated. Even the three nightmares he would have had the night before had magic not ensured that he slept soundly. He began to shake violently, and his eyes misted. Struggling to compose himself, he lifted a quivering hand back to his reflection.
“Calm down!” he croaked hoarsely.
And so, he did. A magical ennui poured over Matt, instantly erasing his trauma, at least for the moment. With that calm came a realization that he had to get out of this place. He could not, would not trust these people. Not to rescue Luke, and certainly not to look after him. He wiped his face with another paper towel and headed back to the gym door.
Luke’s coat was still on a hook where Bryce had left it. Matt put it on and poked his head out the door. There was no sign of anyone. He crept out into the hallway and headed towards the portal through which he had originally come. He had no intention of going back to Doc’s house, of course, but Doc had indicated that he might be able to use the portal to go elsewhere. If that meant going back to his mother’s apartment, so be it.
“Any portal in a storm,” he muttered to himself.
The portal was at the far end of the hall on the other side of a T-intersection. Matt made his way towards it as quietly as he could. At the intersection, he stole a quick peek down the other hall.
“Dammit,” he hissed at the sight of Bryce coming back.
The other Stranger was still about thirty yards down the corridor, while the portal was just twenty feet away. Matt broke out into a run, and from behind him, he heard Bryce call out his name. Once at the heavy door, Matt put both hands on it and reached with his mind. He sensed that the door would automatically lead to Doc’s kitchen,
which was obviously not an option.
But as he searched for alternatives, he was surprised to detect two other potential destinations. Reaching further with his senses, he recognized one instantly as his old bedroom back at his mother’s apartment. And the other? He recognized that one as well and shook his head bitterly at the thought of it.
“Figures,” he muttered. “Doc did say someplace with an intimate connection.”
From behind him, Matt heard Bryce as he skidded around the corner. “Matt, stop! Whatever you’re doing, just stop and listen to me!”
Matt whirled around and gestured at Bryce, yelling “Ragefire!” as loudly as he could. He didn’t even know if “ragefire” was a word or not – it wasn’t – but it certainly summed up his feelings at the moment. An enormous gout of golden fire burst from Matt’s hand towards Bryce. It exploded with magical energy on impact, flinging Bryce back through the air until he hit the wall far at the far end of the corridor so hard that it cracked the plaster in the wall. He fell to the ground, stunned.
Frightened by the display of his own power and a bit unsteady due to the massive juice expenditure he’d just made, Matt took a step towards Bryce, when the Collegian started to stir. Satisfied that he hadn’t killed the man, Matt turned back to the portal. He put his hand on the imaginary dial only he could see and spun it as hard as he could. Then, he pulled the heavy door open and stepped through.
There was a terrible feeling of disorientation that somehow lasted for seconds and for hours at the same time. But then, he was through to the other side. Quickly, he pulled the door shut, and as he did, he felt the momentary connection between the Invisible College and his new location dissolve.
Turning around, he took in his new yet sadly familiar surroundings: the former St. Mark’s Catholic Church, the birthplace of his strangeness. The abandoned sanctuary was largely unchanged from the previous night. There were no signs of the other coven members, but there were still empty candle holders lying on the floor, still boxes of cold pizza and cups of stale cola sitting on the table over by the wall.
About the only thing different was the presence of the three men who turned and looked at Matt in surprise as he burst in through a door that should have led to an empty closet. One of the guys was a red-head with a linebacker’s build. Another was a black guy who looked vaguely like Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. The third was a nervous-looking blond kid not much older than Matt. All three wore cheap black suits, crisp white shirts and black ties. All three of them stared at Matt for several seconds in surprise before he broke the silence.
“Well, I’ll be damned! You really do look like Mormon missionaries!”
CHAPTER 10:
PLAN C
A Basement at Fisher College ...
When Luke’s eyes fluttered open, he was staring up at the musty ceiling of whatever basement served as his jail. He assumed he’d blacked out at some point from a mix of oxygen deprivation and sensory overload. Every muscle in his body felt sore, and every inch of his skin was sensitive.
He vaguely recalled with some embarrassment that he had pissed himself (and possibly had other scatological incidents), but he felt surprisingly clean. He flushed briefly at the possibility that Lindsay had bathed him while he was unconscious but decided that she’d probably just used magic. Even if she had bathed him, it would hardly have been the worst indignity to which she’d subjected him so far.
He was no longer stretched out across the floor and had some freedom of movement (though he was still chained to the pipe), so he glanced around the room. Everything was pretty much the same as before, including the goat, which was still wide-eyed, out-of-place, and smelly. Lindsay, however, had returned. She was kneeling in the center of the room, working on an art project – a sigil of some kind about ten feet across which she was carefully painting on the floor.
Luke started to speak, but then decided against drawing attention from his psychotic captor. It hardly mattered. No sooner had he cleared his head than she called out to him.
“Hey, sleepyhead! You enjoy your little nap?”
Luke thought about a sarcastic reply, but his throat was too sore. “Yeah,” he finally coughed out.
“Well, the spell was designed to put you to sleep if you were in danger of dying or being reduced to drooling idiocy. I have to say you lasted longer than I expected. Hungry?”
He didn’t respond at first. He’d read about Stockholm Syndrome and had no intention of buying into any charm offensive. He was hungry though and thought he would probably need his strength for whatever happened next, so he finally nodded yes. Lindsay handed him a sack of cold fast food that he wolfed down in silence.
“So out of curiosity,” she remarked as she returned to her art project, “are you just that determined to resist me? Or did you just never realize what you needed to do to end that spell?”
He glanced up at her warily. “…what?”
She looked over to him in amusement.
“All you needed to do was say yes, Luke. You know what the Great Beyond is. Most Strangers do. That spell was based on chaos magic. If you’d opened yourself up to whatever part of the Beyond you experienced when you went strange, it would have shattered that spell instantly.”
“You probably should have mentioned that earlier if you were expecting to break me, Lindsay,” he said quietly.
“Oh, I wasn’t expecting to break you with that,” she said. “That was just kid stuff. A little warm-up. Why? Would you have given up that easily if you’d known you could?”
“No,” he replied, but he couldn’t keep his doubts from cracking his voice.
“Good,” she said with delight. “So, I guess I should try something more interesting.”
She moved to the table and picked a small box.
“You remember last month? After our weekly ritual, the whole coven sat around the church drinking cheap beer and playing Truth or Dare? It was very informative. You may recall that I asked everyone what their biggest fears were, and you mentioned arachnophobia. What was it you said? ‘No loving god would create something with that many legs.’”
“Something like that,” he said cautiously.
Lindsay opened the box and removed a small wolf spider, which she playfully allowed to crawl over her hand. Luke shivered and watched her intently.
“So, tell me, Luke. What would you say to a bunch of these little beauties crawling over you?”
Luke stared without blinking as Lindsay played with her pet. “I think it would probably feel a lot like those invisible feathers and fingers tickling me. Surely you don’t want to start repeating yourself, do you?”
“Oh, I never repeat myself, Luke. And don’t call me Shirley.” She tittered at the corny old joke. “By the way, how was your burger?”
“Fine, thank you,” he said with forced politeness.
Almost immediately, he felt a strange rumbling in his stomach, and he wondered with a flash of panic whether she had poisoned his food. The rumbling sensation continued, and Luke felt the familiar watery tickle that preceded a bout of vomiting. But this was different. No bile came pouring up Luke’s windpipe. Just an unnatural feeling in his chest of something ... crawling.
His eyes widened in horror, which prompted another delighted grin from Lindsay, and when some tiny wriggling object climbed up his throat and into his mouth, he reflexively spat it out onto the floor. It was a wolf spider, just like the one Lindsay held, which bounced once on the concrete before quickly crawling away.
Wild-eyed, he looked back at Lindsay, who was leaning back in her chair as if to watch some amusing spectacle.
“YOU BITCH!” he screamed at her. “YOU GOD-DAMNED FUUUAAACCKK—!”
His expletive was suddenly cut off into a crude gurgle as the rumbling returned, now much stronger. His mouth was forced open by whatever foul magic Lindsay had used, and Luke could feel not one spider, but dozens or more crawling up his throat. He shook his head violently as they poured out of his mouth in waves.
>
When he could draw breath, he just screamed hysterically. And then the next wave came, and the next, one after another and each producing more spiders than the last. Those that he could spit out landed on the floor. Those he could not, simply crawled out of his mouth and up over his face or simply landed on his chest. By the fifth wave, something new was added, as tiny louse-sized spiders bypassed his mouth altogether, crawling up through his nasal passages to exit through his nostrils.
Through it all, Luke thrashed and screamed and batted at the swarm of verminous spiders that covered his body. In his terror, he remembered the unnatural shapes behind the cracks in the sky from his earlier vision, and he had an image of them calling out to him, offering to end this waking nightmare.
But then, he remembered the mindless terror he felt from looking into the Reaper’s Pit. And he remembered something else as well: the steel in the green eyes of the old man from his vision. The old man with eyes like his own.
Luke hugged himself and focused inward, trying to master his fears and resist the temptation to give in. It was the hardest thing he'd ever done, but gradually, his panic subsided. He learned to recognize the pattern behind the waves of each spider attack. After about twenty minutes and a dozen waves of eight-legged vomiting, Luke no longer screamed and thrashed. He spent the time between waves breathing deeply and removing any spiders still on his body as calmly as he could.
By the thirty-minute mark, Luke appeared almost blasé about the process, casually leaning over to one side whenever each episode of vomiting began in order to minimize the number of spiders that would land on his person. When it was over, he would brush off the rest and then just turn back to Lindsay with a confident, even contemptuous, gaze. She, in turn, grew disappointed and petulant. Eventually, she waved her hand, and the rumbling in Luke’s stomach finally ceased for good. He gave her a rough smile.
“Thank you, Lindsay. I’ve been afraid of spiders since I was little, but now, I’m pretty sure I’m officially over it. Have you considered giving up destroying the world to go into psychotherapy? You’d be a natural at it.”
