With that, an unseen force ripped him away from her so hard and fast that she could feel his fingernails cutting into her neck. Her eyes widened with horror as he was tossed against the opposite wall, down to the carpet, up to the ceiling and down again to the floor before he was held levitating in the air. The defiance from only a moment before was gone now, replaced with a look of terror and dread. “Please!” he pleaded. “No!”
The cuts began to appear on his forehead at first, and then, like a school of anchovies, thin and dark, they swam over his face, down his neck, under his shirt and back out where she could see them on his forearms. It was as if he were being attacked by a hundred knives, all at once.
All the noise, all the screaming, surely someone would hear. Someone would come to help.
She scoffed at her thoughts. Of course they wouldn’t. The things outside would stop them or, more likely, this entire moment was just outside the borders of normal reality, like in the market that day: no one else could see the demon creatures at all, except Tamara and the kids.
Without warning the monster dropped to the floor in a heap, the force in the room left and everything grew still. Then, to Tamara’s amazement, the monster began to cry. Deep, sorrowful, tormented cries as snot and tears rolled off his face and down into the carpet. He was bleeding from everywhere, in obvious agony.
If she were like him, she would kill him where he lay. But she wasn’t, and despite her resistance to it, a deep sense of pity came over her. Yes, he’d just punched her in the face, and right about now she could settle the score, but then what? The thing in the mirror might do the same to her, or those things outside might just come in and do worse.
She’d heard before, on TV or some place, that the only way to help yourself in a situation like the one she was in was to get your abductor to see you as a human being, and to identify with them somehow. He was obviously on someone’s leash, or something’s leash—something that had just finished jerking him around quite hard. Maybe this was her opening.
“What the hell was that?” Tamara said as she sat cross-legged against the wall.
He didn’t answer, but instead tried to roll over onto his back before crying out in pain. “You… still… can’t… get away,” he moaned, the words like food stuck in his teeth, as he took deep breaths. “They won’t let… you… get… away.”
Tamara nodded. “I know that.”
For a minute or two they remained quiet. Then Tamara spoke again. “What’s your name?”
He blinked and made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “What do you care, you crazy bitch.”
Again, she had to fight the urge to attack him.
“I’m gonna get something to help,” she said. Standing cautiously, she made her way to the bathroom, where she closed the door and glanced quickly in the mirror, a little terrified of what she might see there. Even though her image frightened her, it was still far better than seeing the thing in the mirror. It was gone. She exhaled and told herself to get it together. She took a washcloth, soaked it in warm water and went back into the room.
He was still on the floor, moaning softly now. She knelt carefully next to him. Repulsed by her own actions, but determined to carry them out anyway, she began to wipe the blood off his face, noticing that all the wounds had somehow already sealed and were beginning to scab.
Shit. He even has small cuts on his eyelids. What the hell…
He suddenly spoke up. “Troy.”
“What?”
“My name is Troy. Or was. Whatever.”
She nodded grimly as she continued wiping gently at his face.
He winced. “My mother used to do this, when I had a fever. She used to use a cool cloth though, it was kinda scratchy, and…”
His eyes closed. She wondered for a second if he’d died, the possibility bringing conflicting emotions of relief and worry to mind. Then she heard him snoring softly. He’d passed out.
With this many wounds, who could blame him?
She thought of the mirror behind her and, though she was sure it would be empty, she decided that, having no real need to look, she’d take a pass.
Well, he had a name now. That was something. Troy. She preferred calling him “the monster.”
She wondered how many other women had faced this monster, and shuddered.
“Psst.”
She looked over at him, startled to see that his eyes, trance-like and glassy, were half open. He forced a small smile to his face, breaking one of the cuts on the corner of his mouth; a little blood trickled out, down his chin and over his neck.
“What?” she said.
“Don’t think by being nice to me it can change anything.” Another threat, but this one was different than all the rest. It was tinged in defeat and sadness. “It’s just not how it works.”
“Really?” she said, her voice sounding pitiful to her.
“I hate him, you know.”
“Who?”
“My master. I hate him. Look at me,” he murmured, tears filling his eyes. “I’ve always followed instructions. Done what I was told. Still. Look what he did to me.”
Tamara nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”
His eyes filled with shock. “You’re sorry? No you’re not.”
“Yes I am,” Tamara said. “What he did was mean.”
For a second he looked skeptical but then, maybe due to the pain, his face turned soft. He’d bought it.
“Yeah. It was. But he’s gone now. Even from my head. I think he went off somewhere. So I’m gonna tell you a secret, if you promise not to tell.”
Tamara said nothing. Instead she looked him in the eye and waited.
“The millionth is coming.”
“The… what?”
“The millionth. Your husband. He’s coming.”
Tamara’s heart swelled and she took a deep breath. It couldn’t be, could it? “That’s not true, Troy. Don’t lie to me, okay?”
Like a little child, he scrambled to convince her. “No, no, no. I mean it. I do. He’s coming, and you wanna know what?”
“What?”
“My master?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s afraid of him.”
THEY STOOD outside Room 317 of the Travel Lodge in Los Feliz, leaning against the balcony railing. Parker still couldn’t believe his eyes. Napoleon looked leaner, as if he’d lost a good twenty pounds, and older, his face taut and dry. He hadn’t even been gone all that long.
They’d agreed to save the chitchat for later and get the hell out of the 7-Eleven parking lot as soon as time caught up with them and the world began to work at normal speed. Now, with Trudy inside napping as the kids watched Nickelodeon, Parker gave himself the luxury of wonder. His partner was alive. Standing right here. It didn’t seem possible. Napoleon, meanwhile, was munching his way through a Hot Pocket as he looked out over the city, as if waiting for Parker to break the silence. So Parker did.
“What happened after you disappeared with the gray guy?”
Napoleon chuckled and answered with his mouth half full. “Pwhy-we went to fhell! Phatswhat.”
“Hell? Really?”
He finished his bite. “What else did you expect me to say? You were right there when I made the decision to go.”
Shaking his head, Parker looked at the ground. “I dunno. I guess I was holding out for the possibility that the guy was an alien or something.”
“Would that’ve somehow been better?” Napoleon laughed. Then he chased another bite of his Hot Pocket with the Mountain Dew he’d bought in the vending machine down the hall.
Instead of answering, Parker just shrugged.
“Hmm,” Napoleon said, then looking at Parker he added, “Why man? You got a problem with God?”
You have no idea, Parker thought. But this wasn’t a time for confessions, so he dodged the question. “Don’t we all?”
Napoleon nodded and drank more of his soda. He looked a few more seconds at Parker and then back out over the city
.
It felt like the sun was setting in protest. Parker was exhausted but he couldn’t help but notice the world in orange, glints of red and yellow vibrating through from the horizon line and bouncing off the city skyscrapers in the distance. The air had cooled and was now dancing on the edge of chilly.
A silence visited them, but it was a comfortable one. Both of them seemed to need a little time to wrap their heads around their reunion. When Napoleon finally spoke, his words were heavy and still tinged with what sounded like dazed amazement.
“It’s real, Parker. Hell is real. It’s not some fantasy, it’s not some myth created to control people. I saw it. Another land, another world, that you don’t even want to know about.”
Parker didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded for Napoleon to go on.
“I’d like to be able to describe it better but… man. . . . horrifying is just not a good enough word. I mean, the best I can do is this: imagine being in a place where you feel hunted, every second… hunted… and it never ends. You can’t relax, you can never let your guard down, there is absolutely zero peace of mind to be found.”
“Shit.”
Napoleon’s eyes had gone from wild to lost. “Yeah. For eternity. An eternity of non-stop, relentless fear.”
“How’d you get out?”
“We found Fasano, that’s how. Barely, and almost after it was too late.”
“Where is he now?”
“With the… gray guy, as you call him. Trying to find his wife.”
Parker was surprised. “She’s still alive? I wasn’t betting on that, to be honest.”
“Why?”
“You want to talk about monsters? The guy that has her? He’s earned the title.”
Napoleon blinked. “Yeah?”
“There’s over eighty bodies in various stages of decomposition in a mountain ravine outside of Beaury that can attest to it.”
Napoleon looked stunned. “What?”
“Yeah. He’s been hunting a long time, Nap. Hunting girls from Beaury who dared to move away, or offend him, turn him down for a date, whatever the fuck.”
“Well, I imagine he’s not working alone.”
“No. He’s a solo act. I think we can confirm that.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Parker glanced over the railing. A few cars were parked below, but beyond them, the Travel Lodge was slow today. He had an idea what Napoleon meant, but he didn’t want it confirmed. Napoleon confirmed it anyway.
“His side is helping him, Parker. This angel, or whatever, that has helped us, that was helping Fasano the whole time? He’s part of only half the story. It only makes sense it can happen in reverse, right? You go bad, maybe you start getting some help too. Maybe you end up with a demon friend to lead you along the wrong path. I’m willing to bet that this guy…”
“Troy Forester.”
“Has help.”
“You mean, like, horns and a forked tongue kinda help?” Parker said, feeling silly for saying it.
There was no humor from Napoleon. Not a drop. “Worse,” he said, taking another swig of his Dew. “Way, way worse.”
“How so?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“Man. I need a drink.”
“You and me both.”
“But we can’t leave them alone,” said Parker with a nod to the other room.
“No.”
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
Napoleon stuck out his chin, stretched his neck and nodded.
“The thing you think is helping Forester may be after the kids, right?”
“He and the ones that serve him, yes.”
Parker stepped back from the railing, crossed his arms and shook his head. “I’m sorry, man, but this all sounds Looney Tunes crazy, dude.”
A seagull, miles from the ocean, sailed by overhead as a kid skateboarded down the street below them, the wheels banging over the cracks in the sidewalk as he shifted his book bag from one shoulder to the other. Napoleon had never seemed like the touchy-feely kind, so Parker was surprised when he reached out and put his hand on Parkers shoulder. “No, Parker. I get it now. Not all of it, but a lot of it. It’s not crazy at all. It’s a truth we all believe at some level, even when we think it’s the biggest lie ever. A part of us already knows there’s more to this world than meets the eye.”
“I dunno, man…”
“Yes. You do. The shit we’ve seen on the streets as cops? The shit people do to each other? Hated rivals or people in love, man, it doesn’t matter. You know what I’m saying, right?”
Parker was frozen. He looked at Napoleon and the gaze from his partner was so intense he could not look away.
“You and I, we’ve made a living looking for proof. Of who killed someone, or raped someone, or stabbed their boss. We look for proof of crimes committed. That’s our job, but these very same crimes?”
“Yeah?”
“They’re proof that the place I went to not only exists, but is alive and well in helping all those horrible atrocities to be committed in the first place.”
“Good and evil?”
Napoleon nodded. “And us in the middle.”
“Like pawns or something?”
“We may be pawns, but don’t kid yourself. We move ourselves, Parker, one square at a time, in one direction or the other.”
A gray late-model Ford Mustang came rolling into the Travel Lodge parking lot, bumping rap music through its closed windows. The sun had finally pulled the horizon up over itself like a blanket. Parker cleared his throat as a bus growled by in the distance. “So, what do we do now?”
Napoleon acted like he didn’t hear the question. “Parker. You’ve had to have seen some shit by now.”
You mean like an angel with a dead man by the side of the road? Parker thought. Instead he said, “Yeah. I think I have.”
“Tell me about it,” Napoleon said.
Parker sighed. Why not? So he did.
When he was done, all his partner said was: “Anything else?”
Parker thought hard for a moment. “Only a feeling. At the Fasano house today. Something wasn’t right in the whole place, but especially in the little girl’s bedroom.”
“Like?”
Parker spat the words out like black licorice. “Something was under the bed.”
“Did you see it?”
“No. But I felt it. And then there was that Sebastian kid at the Brasco house. The night you disappeared?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“He came running out the front door like a man fleeing the devil himself, babbling, terrified. He’s still a mess. He’s locked up in the psych ward up in San Francisco.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Damn is right. He’s twenty-three.”
“Casualties.”
The word immediately set Parker on edge. “Yeah. And there’s one I haven’t told you about yet.”
“What?” Napoleon replied, a look of concern on his face.
“Sheriff Conch is dead.”
Napoleon’s face went slack.
“Forester killed him, on the way out of town.”
“How?”
“Stabbed him to death.”
Napoleon put his hand over his face. “Dear Jesus.” When the hand came away he looked more tired than ever.
“So,” Parker pressed, unable to help himself, “what about God and casualties now?”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Casualties are what happen during a war, Nap.”
“I know. And this is one. A spiritual one, all around us. For some reason we make it a war, Parker. We do.”
“What are you saying?”
“With our choices, our free will and the consequences that follow. I still don’t understand it all, Parker. But after what I’ve seen? The really sad thing?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think there’d even be a hell at all, without us.”
CHAPTER 20
<
br /> THEY TRAVERSED THE FIELDS of earth on a road not unlike the one he’d drawn on his notebook back in high school, all those years ago. It wasn’t hard once you got the hang of it. You just had to draw with your mind.
Kyle balanced himself and The Gray Man within the circle and realized that the view as the driver on one of these journeys was much different. As a passenger it was all blurs and colors, almost like you were a kid in a car, looking out the side window as you buzzed down the highway with a parent driving. Now though, looking out the front window, controlling the speed and direction, the world ahead was clear and concise even though it was still moving by at incredible speed. Light beige desert gave way to darker sand with patches of weeds and thickets of Joshua trees, then paved highways and a small town with faint lights and a Chevron gas station before more desert, this time rockier and relieved of flat oblivion by a few rolling hills and a distant mountain.
Tamara was out there, somewhere, and Kyle was determined to get to her, to hold her again, to tell her face to face how sorry he was, for what he’d done and for all that had happened, even though he was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would probably spit on him and curse his name. And who could blame her when she did? This thing he’d done. How could he? He’d sacrificed so much, for so little, and most of it—like a loving wife’s peace of mind or the safety of his children—he had no right to sacrifice in the first place. His mood began to darken.
“There’s no point to it, Kyle,” The Gray Man said softly.
“Point to what?”
“Kyle. If only you knew how many times across the centuries a man has traded everything he has for something he’ll never have.”
“I thought we agreed a long time ago that you’d stay out of my head.”
“I am. It’s in your aura. The colors tell me all I need to know.”
Kyle glanced over briefly at The Gray Man. “Yeah?”
“Yes. It’s how you will truly ‘see’ people eventually. How you will know when they need us, or need to believe in us. It’s also how we know when they’re about to do wrong, or something evil. The colors never lie. They reflect the emotions within, purely and completely.”
One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3) Page 17
