Boy clicked off the flashlight when he heard Pop lurching upstairs. He shoved Catcher In The Rye under his mattress just before his door opened and Pop’s head appeared. Boy breathed slowly and deeply, his body relaxed. It had taken years to learn how to stop his breath coming fast and loud. These days, it didn’t matter how scared he was, he could always bring himself under control in a second. Pop stood still, watching him silently.
The nights Pop drank at home were the worst. He set about drinking with a kind of grim determination, as if it were a chore that needed doing, and needed doing properly. He always drank from a tin cup that used to belong to Grandpa, before he’d passed. “See this cup? It’s my inheritance, Boy. Only thing the mean old bastard left me. One day, it’s gonna be yours.” His humorless chuckle had sounded like a chainsaw struggling to start on a cold morning.
Those nights, the two or three hours of peace were worse, somehow, than the storm that followed. The tension ratcheted up as Pop’s mood swung inexorably from sulky, through irritable to angry. When he finally hit the angry stage—Boy knew it would happen when the level of liquor was close to the bottom edge of the brown label—it was almost a relief. The angry stage lasted between seventeen and forty-three minutes. Then, like night follows day, Pop would get violent. Boy had timed him ever since he’d learned to read the hands on the clock at school seven years ago.
They had been doing percentages in class recently. Boy figured Pop punched him in the stomach sixty percent of the time, shook him till he threw up or his nose started bleeding fifteen percent of the time. Twenty percent of the time, he smacked him in the ribs, over and over. That meant taking a note to school excusing him from gym class. Pop said if he ever let anyone see the bruises, he’d kill Mom. Boy believed him because of the five percent. That was when Pop lost control and hit him in the face, knocked him to the floor and kicked him. He stopped when Boy passed out. At least Boy thought he did. Those times, he had to stay away from school until he was better. If his ribs were broken, Pop would bind them with bandages. Pop had been a medic in Vietnam. He knew how to patch folk up.
The times when Boy’s ribs were cracked, he couldn’t take a full breath for a few days. It sounded like he was wheezing. Pop gave Boy a plastic inhaler to take to school. The other kids thought Boy had asthma. Pop thought that was real funny.
Pop stood in his doorway, listening to his breathing. Boy didn’t dare open his eyes, because he knew the light would reflect on his pupils, Pop would know he was awake and things would get real bad, real quick.
Sometimes Boy daydreamed about coming home from school to find a police cruiser in front of the house. “We’re sorry, son,” the sympathetic officer would say, “but I’m afraid your father has been involved in a terrible accident at work.” Sometimes, the cop would be holding Pop’s blood-stained shirt.
Daydreams were one way of escaping. Books were even better. Boy had learned his letters early. Mom was a reader too, and when Boy was tiny, she’d sit him on her lap as she read. She’d always put her favorite music on while she did it. Pop hated classical music, so she didn’t dare play it while he was there. But when they read together, the sound of the piano or the cello would drift through the house.
Sometimes she’d read passages aloud and Boy would follow her finger along the page, listening to her sweet voice. One afternoon, not long after his third birthday, she had stopped after a few sentences and rubbed her eyes. Boy looked at her finger on the page and picked up the sentence where she’d abandoned it.
“…And that’s when I decided to get on a ship, any ship, and head for America, the land of opportunity.”
At first, Mom had just stared at him, wide-eyed. Then she’d burst out laughing, swept him up in her arms and danced around the kitchen.
“My child is a genius,” she’d said, kissing his cheeks over and over. That was the first day they caught the bus to the library. Boy picked out some books with Mom’s help—The Scarlett Letter, The Three Musketeers, David Copperfield. When they got home, Mom showed him the big saucepan where she hid her books in the kitchen (“like Pop’s ever gonna look there”) and then they found a loose floorboard in Boy’s room beneath which he could hide four or five books.
“Your daddy doesn’t read much, and he doesn’t like smart people,” she said. “It’ll be better if he doesn’t know how clever you are. Our secret, ok?”
“Ok,” he’d said, and they’d linked pinkies in a solemn promise.
He’d loved reading ever since, and once he’d started school, he’d found the library his first day there. He spent most break times in there, looking through the bigger books you weren’t allowed to take home. Encyclopedias, medical dictionaries, scientific reference books. He devoured them all.
Aged seven, he’d won book tokens as a school prize. The school had phoned Mom after she hadn’t replied to the letter inviting her and Pop to the prize giving. She’d told them Pop was working and she suffered anxiety attacks.
“I must ask you not to call me unless it’s an emergency,” she’d said. After she put the phone down, she came and stroked Boy’s cheek. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s check out the bookstore together. I’m buying.”
So Boy chose his own copies of the two books he loved most of all in all the world: Matilda, by Roald Dahl, and The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Matilda was about a girl who learned to read as early as him, but she had weird powers that meant she could move objects with her mind. Boy sometimes dreamed he could do the same. He loved Huck Finn even more. After five years, his copy was starting to fall apart, because he rarely went more than a couple days without picking it up. Huck Finn managed something Boy couldn’t even quite bring himself to dream about. Huck escaped.
“Your headache real, Boy?” Pop muttered from the doorway as Boy carried on feigning sleep. “You wouldn’t just be dreaming up ways to avoid me, would ya?”
Boy lay perfectly still, his breaths long and even, his body totally relaxed. He was floating in space, gazing back at the Earth from the outer reaches of the Milky Way. No one could reach him. Pop grunted and backed out, leaving the door half open.
Boy’s headache was real enough. It even hurt to read, not that he would let that stop him. It was the third headache that week. The pain made him irritable. He was beginning to worry he might say something to Pop, or look at him in a way he didn’t like, because the headache meant he couldn’t concentrate properly.
He opened his eyes in the darkness. From his parents’ bedroom, he heard Pop snoring. He was about to reach out for his flashlight when he heard a noise from his window. He sat up, startled. The curtain moved and a shape was briefly outlined against the moonlit window, before it dropped to the floor and padded toward him.
“Miss Honey!” he whispered, as the cat jumped lightly onto his bed and purred, waiting for some attention. He didn’t know the cat’s real name. It often snuck in nights and Boy was glad of the company. He guessed it belonged to someone in the row of newer houses near the highway. He stroked her under the chin and her purrs became deeper as she pressed against him. He smiled in the darkness.
The headache, which had been like a background noise all evening, suddenly made its presence felt again and Boy hissed as a white-hot stab of pain lit up the space behind his eyes. For a few seconds, he couldn’t see, and it took all his self-control not to call out in panic. Eventually the constant pain turned into a rhythmic throb, then it ebbed away, leaving him gasping in relief.
He took some deep breaths, his sweat cold against his hot skin. Something was wrong. He looked over at the window, the curtain moving slightly in the wind. Then he looked down at his hands. The purring had stopped.
“Miss Honey?”
The cat stared up at him, her green eyes wide open, sightless, almost popping out of their sockets amongst the ginger fur. Slowly, he opened his hands, loosening the terrible grip he’d had around her neck. Her eyes stayed open as she fell back against the cover, her neck twisted at an impo
ssible angle. The small corpse was already stiffening as he felt the tears come. It took forty-three minutes for all of the warmth to leave her body.
5
Mexico City
Present Day
Seb appeared in his apartment in Mexico City a few hours before dawn. He sat at the breakfast counter and put out his hand. As the tv flickered into life, a glass full of orange juice and a bagel covered in peanut butter appeared in front of him—or seemed to. They were actually made up of particles borrowed from the kitchen counter plus bits of dirt and dead skin floating in the air, changed to duplicate the particles found in glass, china, freshly squeezed oranges, bagel and peanut butter. At first, Seb had needed soil to produce physical items, but as Seb2 learned more about the alien operating system now coded into every part of his body, he had been able to expand his use of Manna in new ways.
“Loose end from Dover still needs our attention,” said Seb2. Seb drained the juice and nodded. He had taken care of the gang at the bank, but the syndicate behind the attempted crime would just find some other hired muscle to do their dirty work. And innocent people would continue to die as a result of their crimes.
“Who are they?” thought Seb.
“Most are financiers, but the main player is a programmer, MIT graduate. Tyler Gray. He doesn’t even need to meet his partners, it’s all done online. He’s behind all of it. He finds the muscle. Doesn’t seem to care about the people who die while he pursues his riches. Remove him and there’s no more syndicate. He’s based in LA.”
“Show me,” thought Seb. Suddenly, he wasn’t just looking at the kitchen, his view was overlaid with an image of a room full of computer hardware and a bank of monitors. A young man sat in front of them in a big leather chair. He was wearing boxer shorts and eating cereal, while shouting into a headset.
“How? How is that possible? It took weeks to set up that diversion. Jesus!” He took some deep breaths, scratched his balls and spoke again. “Ok, give me until the weekend and I’ll set up a new target. Find me a team who actually know what the fuck they’re doing this time, ok?”
He took off the headset and tossed it onto the desk. Two of the four huge screens showed real-time stock market information. The other two were full of code that made no sense to Seb.
“He was hard to find,” said Seb2. “He’d set up dozens of dead ends, blind alleys. He thinks there’s no way anyone could ever track the crimes back to him.”
“How hard to find?” thought Seb.
“3.43 seconds,” said Seb2.
“Stop showing off,” thought Seb, “and show me another room. I’ll Walk there.” A few other rooms appeared in Seb’s vision, including the master bedroom, which led out to a balcony and an ocean view. The walls were lined with books.
“Wasn’t showing off,” said Seb2. “He’s a prodigy. I would have had him in under a second otherwise.”
Seb Walked.
The balcony doors were open and the sound of the waves was the only noise apart from the rhythmic tapping of computer keys from the next room. Seb walked across to the nearest bookcase. Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, HR James, Peter Strauss, Clive Barker.
“Tyler likes his horror literature,” thought Seb.
“Yep,” said Seb2. “Oh. Ok, that’s funny. I get it. Great idea. Just don’t spoil it by laughing.”
“I’ll do my best,” thought Seb. He closed his eyes briefly and felt the by-now familiar rippling of his skin and muscle as he changed, his body morphing into a new shape. He stepped across to the foot of the bed to look in the full length mirror. He still had to duck to see himself fully, as he was now seven feet tall.
“Shit!” he said quietly as he saw what he’d become. He was the perfect, nightmarish circus clown. His face was white and smeared, as if the makeup had been hurriedly applied. The wig was supposed to be green, but was matted with blood and hung limply on his shoulders. The areas of skin visible beneath the white were crusty, dark red, pustulant. His eyes were yellow and bloodshot, his nose obscured by a red sphere that, on closer inspection, looked like some bloated throbbing blood vessel. His mouth was just a little bigger than seemed humanly possible, and his smile revealed blackened teeth filed into vicious points, the tongue a mass of old wounds and newly made gouges, where the teeth were constantly ripping the flesh. Blood seeped from the corners of his mouth.
“Sure this won’t scare him to death?”
“He’s young and healthy,” said Seb2. “Look on the bright side. He’ll definitely spend less time indoors after this, so his health will actually improve.”
“Hmm,” thought Seb and walked out of the bedroom. The door to the room he wanted was closed, so he knocked slowly, three times, for dramatic effect.
Behind the door, Tyler froze for half a second, then threw himself off of the chair, opened a drawer, removed a handgun and checked it, while backing slowly into a corner. Seb still had an overlay of the room open, and he watched the young man sweat as he clicked the safety off.
“You just made a huge mistake, asshole!” Tyler yelled. Then he frowned and scanned one of the screens, leaning forward to jab at a couple of keys. His expression changed briefly to one of utter bewilderment as he checked the data.
“He designed his own security system,” said Seb2. “It’s probably the best I’ve ever seen. As far as he’s concerned, you’re not here. It’s physically impossible. He was looking for traces of carbon dioxide from your breath, as well as a heat signature from your body. He found nothing. Now he’s going to start thinking he just imagined it. Time to convince him otherwise.”
Stepping close to the closed door, Seb opened his mouth. His chest was now fifty-two inches wide, and his internal organs had been shifted to the sides in order to produce a resonant chamber bigger than any human in history. The result, when he spoke, was so deep, rich and loud, it made Darth Vader sound like Mickey Mouse in comparison.
“Ty…ler,” said Seb, his voice rumbling like the idling engine of a monster truck. Behind the door, Tyler let out an involuntary shriek and backed hurriedly all the way into the corner.
“I’ll shoot!” he screamed, his voice cracking with fear. “I mean it! You’re gonna die unless you leave. Right now!”
Seb was silent for a count of ten. Just long enough for Tyler to start to believe his threats may have had the desired effect. Just long enough for his heart rate to stop climbing. Just long enough for him to start breathing again. Then Seb threw the door open so hard it flew off its hinges, ducked under the doorframe, took two quick paces into the room, and drew himself up to his full height.
Tyler Gray was an intelligent man. He may have directed this intelligence in a direction that benefitted only himself, but there was no denying his capacity for solid, rational thought. To his credit, when faced with a creature seemingly straight out of his worst nightmares, he didn’t collapse immediately. Logic told him this was some kind of trick, his security system—impossible as it seemed—had been beaten, and the creature now dripping blood onto his Persian rug was, undoubtedly, human. So, bullets would put an end to it. Consequently, he emptied ten rounds into the clown, all of them into his chest.
“Good shooting,” thought Seb as the wounds closed, cauterized and disappeared. The fact that his heart, lungs and spleen were currently out of harm’s way meant there was little damage to repair.
“He has some skill, certainly,” said Seb2.
Seb stepped forward again. He was two feet away from the cowering young man, who, after looking at his gun in disbelief, was now sliding down the wall and beginning to cry. Seb opened his mouth as wide as it would go—which was horribly wide—and roared in Tyler’s face. He roared for a full half-minute. As he did so, flecks of blood and tiny pieces of flesh from his ruined tongue hit Tyler on the forehead, cheeks, lips and eyes, until the sobbing man’s view of the clown was momentarily obscured by a film of red. He blinked frantically, rubbed it away and moaned. The clown was still there. This was really happening.
“I COME FROM IN THERE,” said Seb, pointing at the nearest screen. The bass profundo effect of his new voice was so pronounced that the beer bottle and car keys on the desk rattled and moved as he spoke.
Tyler’s mouth opened and closed a few times but no sound emerged.
“I’VE BEEN WATCHING YOU, TYLER. YOU ARE NO LONGER WELCOME IN MY DOMAIN.”
“Wha-? Wh-?” Tyler swallowed and managed a single word. “Where?”
Seb leaned forward even closer and smiled. Tyler whimpered and quietly soiled himself.
“IF I EVER SEE YOU AGAIN, I WILL COME FOR YOU, TYLER GRAY.”
Seb turned toward the desk. He lifted a giant foot, complete with a blood-caked clown shoe about twenty-five inches long, and stepped directly into the nearest computer screen. Tyler watched, sobbing as the impossible happened right in front of him. The clown’s foot was followed by his leg, then he sat on the desk and put his other leg inside. Nothing came out of the back of the screen. It was as if this monster was climbing through a window. Next, he hoisted the rest of his body through, until only his nightmarish head remained. Then the neck twisted and the face looked toward Tyler, its cold, dead, yellow eyes fixed on his.
“I’LL BE WAITING FOR YOU.” One more smile, then the head followed the body through and was gone.
Tyler sat there for nearly half an hour, before daring to believe the nightmare was over and the creature had really gone. He pushed himself back up into an upright position, wincing at the smell coming from his shit-caked boxer shorts. He looked at the computer screens. All the regular data were gone, replaced by a simple message: I’ll be waiting for you, Tyler.
Tyler screamed, yanked all the plugs out of the wall and ran from the room. He never went in again. He never touched another computer in his life. He also avoided circuses.
6
New York
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 39
