Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1)

by Daniel Humphreys

  Heavy footsteps boomed across the floor above. I made another visual circuit of the basement, paused, then turned to look at the water heater. Could I . . ?

  The timing would be critical. It was the longest of long shots and just this side of crazy. I wasn’t sure if it would work and I was a little fuzzy on the details. Of course, my suggestion box wasn’t exactly overflowing with any other options.

  I took a breath to steel my nerves. Crossing mental fingers, I focused, reached out, and deployed the last arrow in my metaphysical quiver just as Melanie stormed down the steps into the basement. She charged across the room, then seemed to recall that we outnumbered her. She paused so her trio of minions could catch up.

  Hands on her hips, she demanded, “Where is it?”

  I feigned innocence and replied, “Where’s what? Sounds like you found it.” I jerked my head in the direction of the driveway. “If you scratched the paint I’m going to need your insurance information.”

  Melanie snapped her fingers and one of the clones stepped forward and took hold of my shirt. He lifted me up and slammed me against the wall, high enough off of the ground that my feet dangled.

  “I’m not talking about your piece of shit RV,” she hissed. “Where’s the book? We tore the inside apart. It’s not there.”

  “Well,” I temporized, “the overdue fines were getting to be a problem, so I had to take it back to the library . . .”

  “Uno,” she barked.

  Whatever unearthly process Melanie had used to forge the duplicates may have split Trace’s original intellect in three, but it had left his strength intact or even enhanced. Uno held me one-handed with ease. This left the other free to flash out and sink a pair of quick punches into my still-aching chest. I grunted but forced myself to grin. “Come on! Do it! You think I’m more or less likely to talk if you beat me to death? You stupid, psychotic bitch!”

  A strange look passed over Melanie’s face. I regretted the remark almost immediately.

  Good job, Paxton, spin up the nut job!

  “Trace,” Melanie cooed. “Break both of our other visitor’s arms, would you?”

  He’d taken two steps toward Cassie when the basement vibrated with the Edimmu’s voice.

  Stop. You go too far. She is mine.

  Melanie grimaced, but she beckoned Trace back. “What would you have me do, then?”

  I have shown you the way. Make him tell you.

  The smile that crept across Melanie’s face held a sickening joy, like a child forbidden from frying ants with a magnifying glass who was just handed a blowtorch.

  She met my eyes. I tried to look away, but Uno grabbed the back of my head in an implacable grip and kept my face pointed at her. I could have closed my eyes, but before I got the opportunity, Melanie pushed.

  “Paxton, dear. Where did you hide the grimoire?”

  I’ve been on the receiving end of the push twice in my life. Perhaps I tried to forget the insidious warmth of it, but the memories resurfaced as I tried to fight against the magic. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to give her what she needed. It seemed right and proper. Trying to fight or question the need to tell her just led to confusion. Cooperation was a much easier mental path.

  “Don’t tell her!” Cassie yelled from across the room, but Melanie’s gaze didn’t shift from mine. I gritted my teeth as I tried to keep my mouth shut. In my own defense, I seemed to be resisting the urge just a bit better than I had the last time, but it was an improvement of inches. I scrambled for other words, for more defiance to throw into her face, but I failed.

  “Dagobah.” A rush of pleasure went through me at the admission. “It’s buried inside Yoda’s hut.”

  Confusion twisted Melanie’s features, but the Edimmu cackled with delight.

  Yes, yes. Use the push, do you see it now?

  I felt an indefinable shuffling inside of my head, as though she’d opened my skull and was fingering her way through my brain like a filing cabinet. Melanie beamed. “Yes!” she crowed. “I see it! Dos, Trace, we’re going to need a shovel, and . . .”

  I made my move. Her mistake had been limiting the push to the question at hand. As soon as I answered to her satisfaction, the fog lifted from my brain. And, in a stroke of convenience, my feet were already off of the ground.

  My right foot slammed into the side of Melanie’s temple. She let out a cry of surprise at the sudden pain as she lost her balance and fell to the floor. I twisted in Uno’s grasp, in a vain attempt to get a grip on his arm to fight back. The move was not only ineffective — I was suddenly at short-range with an enraged minion.

  “No urt Mel-knee!” he growled as he started punching me in the stomach and chest. He didn’t stop, even as I continued to try to twist out of his grasp. I kicked out, landing strikes on his shins, knees, and thighs that might as well have been love pats for all the effect they had. My continued resistance must have enraged him even further because he growled and shifted his grip down off of my head to grasp me by the belt. With a grunt of exertion, he swung, as though I were little more than a flexible, fleshy baseball bat.

  The back of my head slammed into the foundation wall with what felt like bone-shattering force. As my vision went black, I was only vaguely aware of falling to the floor in a heap.

  I’ve always considered my dreams to be fairly ordinary. Despite the horrible things that I’ve seen and experienced in my relatively short life, they are little different than they were before my life changed. Obviously, I only have myself as a frame of reference, but it seems to be the usual. Public speaking in your underwear, flying, running from faceless pursuit, that sort of thing.

  Do people dream when they get knocked unconscious? I don’t know. I didn’t even realize that I was in a state of black unawareness until I began to shift into something else. I was surfacing from the bottom of the ocean, but when I opened my eyes, I moved into something that felt much more tangible than any dream I’d ever had.

  The pain in my bruised and battered body was gone. I was sitting in a comfortable chair. I felt a damp coolness against my hand and after a moment I realized that it was a soda in a cup holder. I took a deep breath, savoring the absence of pain from my much-abused ribs. The rich scent of Flavocal and coconut oil filled the air.

  Popcorn?

  If I was dreaming that I was in the movie theater, that hit must have been worse than I’d thought. Maybe they broke something permanently and this was what a coma was like.

  I opened my eyes.

  In the dim flicker of the projection screen, I recognized the one place that dad and I alone had shared. Mother had always proclaimed the cinema too gauche for her tastes. I’d never understood that notion. The Renaissance Theater in Sturtevant was not only sumptuous in decoration, they served everything from pasta to Asian fusion. Dad and I never got too fancy, though, despite everything they had to offer. Sometimes we’d go crazy and do pizza, but the popcorn was our snack of choice.

  Kernels rustled in a bucket and I turned slowly to my left. A big man with a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke and a pair of glasses perched on his nose smiled sheepishly and offered the popcorn. I stared, speechless.

  “Dad?” I said, more loudly than I intended. He frowned and nodded at the screen.

  “Sssh. This is my favorite part.”

  I glanced at the screen, but I was in too much of a state of shock to pay much attention. I got a quick look at what seemed to be the inside of a castle, then turned back.

  The speakers around us boomed, “So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?”

  Now, despite my lack of attention to what was on the screen, I knew. I’d certainly watched it enough with dad to know the lines by heart.

  Bernard Hill as King Theoden in The Two Towers — one of my all-time favorite movies, but at the moment I couldn’t have cared less. “Dad, what is this? Is this a dream?”

  Dad sighed and produced a remote control. He pressed a button and Viggo Mortenson paused in mid-word. Ride out a
nd meet them, my mind supplied, automatically. In or out of the dream world, I rock at movie trivia.

  “Paxton, does this feel like a dream?”

  I hesitated, then said, “No, not really.” I glanced at the remote in dad’s hand and added, “But then again …”

  “Trust that feeling, son.” Dad looked thoughtful for a moment. “Trust me. This is a crossroads, of sorts. The surroundings are as they are to make you feel more at ease.” He grinned. “But you always did have to ask why about everything.”

  Tears spilled from my eyes — you can’t cry in a dream, can you? — and I leaned over and hugged him fiercely. I crushed the tub of popcorn between us, but I didn’t care.

  “I’m so sorry,” I sobbed into his chest. “I tried to stop her, but I didn’t push soon enough . . .”

  “Oh, Pax,” he said, his own voice thick. “Oh, son. Listen to me. It was not your fault. All things have a purpose. All things serve, in the end.”

  I pulled back just a bit and scrubbed at my nose, which had started to run. I was starting to accept the argument that this wasn’t a dream. Who’d dream about snotting all over yourself?

  “Okay,” I whispered. “Okay.” I held onto the hug, trying to sear every moment of it into my memory. The memories of those we love are nowhere near as indefatigable as that which we fear or desire to forget. The fact that the pages of Mother’s grimoire had branded themselves into my mind was a painful and ironic reminder that the voice of my own father had grown murky up until this strange, surreal moment. “So,” I said, finally. “Crossroads.”

  Dad leaned back in his seat and favored me with a smile. “It’s a decision point, Pax. You have to decide whether to move on or if you want to stay and fight.”

  “Dying, you mean.”

  “You got it, bud.” His smile was wistful. He looked as though he wanted to say something more, but he remained silent.

  I stared at my father for a long, silent moment, then turned to look at the movie screen. At this point in the movie, the evil Uruk-hai have our heroes surrounded. In a last, desperate attempt to give the women and children time to escape, the good guys charge at the overwhelming horde massing outside their doors. It’s a suicide run, sure as it gets, until they’re saved, in miraculous fashion by the wizard Gandalf and the riders of Rohan.

  I might have been too slow on the uptake to suss out the trap that Melanie had laid for me. This time, I didn’t need a cluebat.

  This was my Helm’s Deep. This was my suicide run.

  I turned back to dad. “I get a choice?”

  “Of course, you do, son.” He gave me a sad smile. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  The point of what? I wondered but didn’t ask. “If I go, I go with you?”

  “For a little while,” he agreed. “But . . .”

  “Ah,” I said, thinking back on my talks with Father Rosado. “The, umm, bouncer.” The tears threatened to come back again. I swallowed past the thickness in my throat. “Dad, I don’t know if . . .”

  He interrupted me, “Son, all things serve. All things. You would never have been able to read the book if you weren’t intended to. Your choices matter, yes, but your path is not set. You take the steps. And you’ve made mostly good ones.” He frowned and gave me a look over the top of his glasses. “Mostly.”

  I winced, thinking about hypochondriacs convinced of their hauntings and the walking-around money I’d extracted from them. “Hey, nobody’s perfect,” I protested.

  Dad laughed. “You’re exactly right, son. More than you know or understand.”

  “If I go back, I might die.”

  “That’s true,” Dad allowed. “But you might not.”

  “If I go on . . .” I paused. “Cassie?”

  Dad nodded. “She’s of no use to them without the book. She’ll pass herself not long after. I’ll leave it to your imagination as far as how long that might take. But there are other paths. If the Edimmu continues to be an influence on Melanie, well. All things serve, but some events are more preferable.”

  “What is it? The Edimmu.”

  Dad shook his head slowly. “I’m not allowed to tell you that. But I can say that the creature is a thing that is, but should not be.” He picked up the remote. “We’ve got time. Let’s watch a bit more.”

  The movie resumed. I sat with my father as the heroes charged. John Rhys-Davies as Gimli blew Helm’s Horn. Finally, at the last, dramatic moment, the camera zoomed in on Ian McKellan and Karl Urban. They led the surviving Rohirrim in a cavalry charge that seemed doomed to fail with overwhelming casualties — until the light of the rising sun crested the mountain behind them and blinded the Uruk-Hai who were set to receive the charge. The monsters recoiled from the light and the good guys won.

  Darkness began to creep in at the edges of the screen and the light faded there slowly. The soundtrack was quieter now, muted as though passing through some great distance.

  “I wish we could stay longer, son, but this is it.”

  I looked him in the eye and murmured, “I love you, Dad. But send me back.”

  The darkness reached the seats, but I wasn’t afraid. I sensed that the darkness wasn’t so much the light leaving this place as it was my passage away from it. The light could never leave where I had just been, but I couldn’t stay there any longer. In the distance, as the theater faded out, I heard my father’s voice as clear as day.

  “I love you too, son.”

  Chapter 12

  I awoke to quiet sobbing.

  For a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was or even who I was. As I lay there it came back to me bit by bit, in time to the throbbing pulse of my head. Cracking an eye open, I whispered, “How long have I been out?”

  “Paxton?” Feet shuffled on the concrete. I felt her kneel beside me. “I thought you were . . .”

  I pushed down the urge to finger the swollen knot at the back of my head and said, “Closer than you’d believe. Maybe even mostly. How long?”

  “I don’t know — half an hour, maybe? They left in a hurry.” Cassie’s voice turned bitter. “They didn’t forget to set their watchman, though.”

  Half an hour? Holy crap.

  I forced myself to sit up, then stared at the water heater.

  The spells that I learned from the grimoire, save one, came about as a result of my consciously-expressed needs and desires. Invisibility, to grant some privacy from a world that seemed far too fascinated in me after my father died. The ability to find and speak with ghosts, in the vague hope that I might be able to find my father. Healing. None of those were the first spells I learned. I sought them out after I discovered that there was far more to the ancient book than its benign appearance suggested.

  I learned my first spell by a random chance of fate. A few weeks after I’d woken to a reality in which my mother was in jail and my father was dead, I’d sat at the kitchen table, still not sure what I was reading. When I’d seen the book on the shelf, it had struck me almost instantly as being out of place. When I pulled it down and flipped through the pages, some hunch — urge? — told me to hide it from Kent and Esteban. Alone for what felt like the first time in weeks, I flipped through the pages and idly glanced at the cuneiform lettering. As I paused on a page perhaps a third of the way into the book, I looked up at the refrigerator and thought about grabbing a soda to drink.

  The fluttering motion of the letters garnered my attention. As I studied them and began to comprehend them, I realized that with practice, I could grab a soda without leaving my chair.

  In all honesty, the telekinesis spell is not quite as useful as you’d expect. As with the healing, there is the issue of conservation of energy. I can’t pick up a car because I can’t pick up a car without the use of heavy equipment or a jack. Plucking a can out of the fridge? Easy.

  It gets harder over a distance of course, but within, oh, thirty feet or so, it’s somewhat useful. I don’t use it much because, let’s be honest, in the time it takes me to focus and enact the
effect, I could just as easily walk across the room and get my own soda.

  But when you need to surreptitiously kink the pressure and temperature release valve of a water heater to prevent it from opening? Telekinesis fits the bill. Cranking up the temperature? Even easier.

  Thanks, Mr. Toft, wherever you are. The Mythbusters episodes my teacher let his students watch in physics class might just save Cassie and me.

  First things first, though — I had to address the newest addition to my library of pain.

  How do you cast a healing spell with a throbbing whale of a goose-egg on the back of your head, when said casting requires calm and concentration?

  Answer – poorly, if at all. I felt the swelling on the back of my head lessen, with a similar reduction in the tight feeling and tenderness of the skin. It didn’t help much, but it was the best I could do at the moment. Now I just needed to make sure that my brilliant plan didn’t kill Cassie or myself. I glanced over at the clone, then waved a hand in his direction. His eyes flickered over, but he didn’t otherwise stir. Interesting.

  I turned back to Cassie. “Help me up,” I muttered through clenched teeth. I was still starving, which was going to make this all the more difficult, but time was of the essence. More likely than not, our guard dog wouldn’t offer to grab me a snack and there was a near-literal ticking time bomb down here with us.

  You don’t really think about the amount of potential force there is in a water heater. Let’s be honest, they’re almost bulletproof in safety terms. But intentional sabotage is something different — not to mention easy — if you know what you’re doing.

  Or if you’re a long-time connoisseur of Adam and Jamie.

  Water expands as it warms. An enclosed cylinder containing it, being metal, does not. This normally doesn’t present an issue for water heaters, as a safety valve will kick in and purge water from the system in the event temperature — and as a result, pressure — reaches unsafe levels. With the valve removed from the equation, the weak links are the seams in the metal itself. The weakness tends more toward the join at the bottoms and top rather than the body of the cylinder itself, as a function of pressure versus surface area.