Captain Quad

by Sean Costello

  And screamed, shrill and long, the force of her release converted to the lethal explosive of terror. She awoke crying Peter's name—and found a stranger on top of her, hips bruising hers, alien eyes rolled back in the perverse delight of rape. She screamed and flung him off and he landed in a heap on the floor, his head cracking hard against the windowsill, splitting the scalp and bringing blood.

  In his hospital bed five miles away, Peter awoke in his twisted body, bewildered, exhilarated, afraid. He lifted his head and in the moonlight saw a spreading wet stain on his bedsheet. The thrill of release still rippled the muscles of his jaw.

  The voice of reason immediately tried to insinuate itself—You've been having some pretty hi-tech dreams lately, pal, but that's all they are, don't kid yourself, they're only dreams—but the voice was weak, its conviction foundering.

  You were alive, a new, firmer voice told him. For a few incredible minutes that fucker's body was yours, and you were alive!

  Peter's smile glowed like the snow in the pines outside.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  They were silent for a long while, as if by unspoken assent. Will, still dazed from the crack his skull had taken on the sill, sat elbows on knees on the toilet seat, while Kelly, sick and ashamed at the way her erotic dream had been transformed into nightmarish reality, drew the wound edges together with a bandage. The cut was long, but not deep enough to require stitches. She was glad of the silence, even at the cost of a shell-shocked boyfriend. It gave her time to think.

  Her immediate reaction upon finding Will on top of her had been one of anger and revulsion. True, they had made love earlier that evening, and it had been good, but in no way did that give him the right to take her in her sleep! Split scalp or not, she'd come within an ace of throwing him out of her house. Once she'd flicked on the lights, however, and seen that Will was just as befuddled as she—and worse, that blood was tracking down behind his left ear—she'd realized that her anger was merely a front to disguise her shame. Helping him into the bathroom, wobbly herself from the sedative she'd taken, she had constructed in her mind a version of what had most likely taken place.

  She'd awakened Will with the carnal thrashings of her dream—in all probability, she'd unknowingly reached for him as a substitute for Peter—and in a drug-induced stupor had failed to distinguish between dream and reality. Will had not jumped her in her sleep—a thought a tad too necrophilic for Kelly's tastes—she had jumped him. Oh, God, and then she'd tossed him out of bed, split his scalp on the windowsill, and quite possibly given him a concussion. His eyes were still glazed and unfocused. He looked like a boxer who'd just lost the title to a knockout.

  "Are you all right?" she said now, breaking the minutes-long silence.

  Will made a noise that might have been a word when it was conceived in his brain—"nnngth"—then cleared his throat. "I think so," he said at length. "What in hell happened in there?"

  "Don't you remember?"

  "Not a thing," Will said, shrugging. "I was having this dream. . . I was in a scrap with some guy, only he wasn't a real guy, he was some kind of a. . . spook, I guess." He chuckled without mirth. "Weird. He really smoked me, sort of snuck up behind me and hammered me senseless. Next thing I knew I was on the floor beside the bed, feeling like I did the one and only time I O.D.'d on tequila." He chuckled again, and winced. "I was seventeen. . . What did happen in there?"

  Kelly dabbed the last of the blood from Will's neck with a damp facecloth. "I don't know," she said.

  But as the drug fog lifted and the shock tapered off, a devastating truth took shape in Kelly's mind. She was a young, attractive woman, intelligent, self-sufficient, sought after by men, and almost certainly loved by the one she now ministered to—but she was a helpless slave of the past, as tied emotionally to Peter Gardner as Peter was to his bed. She could think of no other way to explain it. She supposed she had known it all along, deep down. It was a truth that had bubbled to the surface before, like swamp gas in the sometimes wretched morass of her heart. But she'd always managed to deny that truth, to veil it behind some new and more brittle fiction: I don't need Peter Gardner. I don't need anyone. I'm going to become a teacher, and a good one at that. Besides, who's got time for dates? I've got to work. I've got to study. And I can take care of the ache by myself. . .

  She looked down at Will and knew that she could never sleep with him again. It wouldn't be fair to either of them. God help her, she didn't even know her own feelings any more. A few hours ago she'd believed herself in love with this man, finally freed from her past. . . and now look at her. The first time in six years that she decides to give of herself, really give, and Peter pops up like a ghost and ruins it.

  It was a tough decision to make, but as long as she was tied to Peter, she was better off alone. Better to make a clean break with Will. . . and to do it right now.

  "How do you feel?" she asked, brushing a stray lock of hair from his forehead.

  "Better," he said, stifling a yawn. "What time is it?" Kelly glanced at her wristwatch. Rose-colored light dappled the frosted glass of the bathroom window. "Quarter to six."

  Will moaned. "Should we bag it for another hour?"

  "I don't think so, Will," Kelly said, taking his hand. "If you feel up to driving, I think you should leave."

  There was a note of finality in Kelly's words that perplexed and frightened Will Chatam. He was totally gone on this girl, and the possibility that he had said or done something to screw it up—especially now, after they'd just made love for the first time—filled him with dread and an abrupt, abiding self-hatred. Something had happened in that bedroom, something that was lost completely to Will. But it had finished them. He knew that with an almost preternatural certainty.

  "What happened?" he asked again, holding Kelly's gaze despite the tears he knew would soon come.

  "I. . . can't tell you that, Will. I'm not even sure myself." She took a slow, ragged inhalation. "But I think it would be best if we didn't see each other again for a while."

  She didn't say forever, Will thought immediately, choosing to cling to this slim hope rather than face the hurtful truth that lurked between the lines. "If a woman needs space," his mother had once counseled him, "give it to her. Give her that space or you'll lose her." And despite an almost insuperable urge to challenge Kelly's words, to plead with her if that was what it took, Will decided to heed his mother's advice.

  "All right, Kelly," he said softly as he wobbled to his feet. Kelly reached out to steady him—and Will took her firmly by the shoulders, trying to break through the misty dullness in her eyes, wanting only to be heard and understood. "But I meant what I said last night. By the fireplace."

  "I know," Kelly said, giving him a smile filled with warmth and affection. "Thank you."

  He wanted to say more—Call me if you need me, I'll be there for you, Kelly, I love you—but he released her shoulders, kissed her lightly on the forehead, and turned away. "I can find my own way out," he said.

  Then he was gone.

  Hurt and bewildered, Kelly climbed into the shower. She stayed there until the water went cold, then set about getting ready for school.

  The fiction proved almost impossible to sustain during that cruelly foreshortened day, and when the catastrophe occurred, Kelly came completely unstitched. The reins of her mind had slipped out of reach, down among the stampeding hooves of her thoughts, and there was simply no way she could concentrate on her job. In the aftermath of a single lustful dream, her life lay in ruins. Obeying her heart instead of her head, she'd broken things off with the sweetest guy she'd come across in years, a man who genuinely cared for her. She'd known all along that her feelings for Peter still existed, had even accepted the fact that in all probability they would remain with her forever. But she'd always believed that time would scab the wounds over. She'd anticipated scars, the low-grade itch of slow healing. . . but she would never have believed that the ghosts of her past could scrape the wounds raw with only a dream.
>
  But what a bizarre dream it had been! The tangible fusing with the imaginary so eerily, so convincingly. Every man who had ever touched her intimately had left a sort of sensory memory on her skin, and Kelly felt confident that if she were to close her eyes now and each of them were to touch her in turn, she could name them with the slightest embrace. And though the man on top of her last night had been Will, the physical memories he'd awakened had been of Peter, right down to his lips on the nape of her neck, arousing her so intensely. . .

  "Miss?"

  Kelly whirled to face her students, feeling her face redden but powerless to prevent it. How long had she been out of it?

  The girls' gymnastic team stood in uneven ranks around her, exchanging puzzled glances and furtive remarks. She'd come into the abandoned gym to prepare for her morning practice and had spotted a loose bolt at the floor end of one of the guy wires supporting the low bar. She'd bent to fix it. . . and then her thoughts had run off on her again, and she'd failed to notice that seventeen buzzing teenagers had come stomping into the gym.

  "Miss Wheeler?"

  It was Tracy Giroux, the team captain. Tracy liked Miss Wheeler, who had taken a special interest in her early in the term, when Tracy was having a problem with drugs, and now she rounded on her teammates like an angry cat, surprising them into silence.

  "Is something the matter?" the gymnast said, touching her teacher's arm. "Should we, like, cancel practice till Monday?"

  "No, Trace," Kelly said, trying on a smile. "I was just. . . thinking."

  Before Tracy could say any more, Kelly raised her whistle to her lips and gave it a blast, a familiar action linking her to the here and now. The sound ricocheted off the polished surfaces of the gym like a misfired bullet. In response, the girls formed lines, their lithe bodies preparing for a brief aerobic warm-up, then the more taxing maneuvers of the various gymnastic stations.

  Lagging behind the others, Tracy gave Kelly a look that said "If I can help, Miss Wheeler, I will," and this time Kelly's smile was genuine.

  Setting her teeth, she led the girls through their warm-up. Twice she forgot which move came next—Tracy picked up the slack in these spots, her evil eye stifling the snickers of her fellows—and during the running-in-place segment Kelly simply forgot to quit, continuing the repetitive motion until the girls began to complain. At this point common sense screamed at her to cancel the practice, maybe even the whole day, feign the flu and go home, take another pill and crash. . . but a more headstrong part of her rejected this approach, recognizing it for what it was, a yellow streak of weakness that disgusted her. Later she would wish she had succumbed to it.

  "Okay," she bugled in her coach's voice. "Tracy, Shelley, Catrina—high bar. I'll spot. Ali. You, Petra. . .”

  Her own voice became a distant drone as she split the girls into groups, assigning each to a different apparatus and appointing spotters, making sure that everyone had something to do. Everything around her seemed subtly out of sync as she approached the high bar—the lights too bright, the clamor of the girls almost painfully high-pitched, the edges of physical objects impinging on her retinas so intensely they gleamed like surgical steel. Even the air in front of her seemed to twitch like a desert heat haze.

  She boosted Tracy up to the high bar, aware of the girl's slim waist between her hands, the synthetic feel of her tights. . . but the more familiar her surroundings became, the more paradoxically alien they seemed to her. Tracy was a great kid, a talented kid, who'd merely started off on the wrong foot. Kelly had helped this kid, and it had felt good, fulfilling. Tracy was captain of the gymnastics team now, respected by her peers, fawned over by the boys; her marks were on the upswing—and wasn't that what this was all about? Wasn't that why she, Kelly, had gone into teaching in the first place?

  Then why, suddenly, did it all seem so empty? Could a single confused dream destroy all she had striven to achieve?

  Tracy was coming to the end of her routine, and the eyes of her fellows were upon her. Tracy was the team star, her skill and grace virtually assuring them a shot at the Provincials in the spring. She rotated through a giant hock circle, releasing the bar at the bottom of the arc and then spinning to reverse her grip.

  She missed.

  Tracy cried out as her Danskin-clad body whizzed past Kelly's unseeing eyes, flapping like a flag in a wind gust. Too late, Kelly threw out her arms, and Tracy whoofed to the mat at her feet. There was a greenstick crack! followed by a tortured cry, and Kelly clapped her hands to her ears and looked down. Writhing in pain, Tracy gaped back at her with shock and accusation in her eyes. Her left forearm was fractured, the bone gleaming ivory through the skin, blood snaking back to her elbow.

  "Gross!" one girl cried. Another bolted for the change room, hands clamped over her mouth. The rest only stood there, faces white with shock, dazed eyes barely comprehending what they were seeing.

  Kelly, too, only stood there. Her right hand had gone to her own left arm, and now it massaged the puckered knot of scar tissue there.

  Tracy's wretched eyes broke the spell.

  "Karla," Kelly barked at the girl standing nearest. "Run into the office and call an ambulance. The number's on a card by the phone. The rest of you clear out of here. Now!"

  As the girls scuttled out, glancing back over their shoulders, Kelly yanked the drawstring out of her sweatpants and knelt over the injured gymnast. Tracy shrank back from her, and Kelly's heart broke all over again.

  "Why didn't you spot me?" Tracy cried, tears coursing in rivers down her face. "You were supposed to spot me!"

  "I'm sorry," was all Kelly could say. "I'm sorry, Tracy."

  After using the drawstring as a tourniquet, Kelly fetched Tracy a pillow and a blanket from her office, then waited with her for the ambulance to arrive.

  "You were supposed to spot me," Tracy kept sobbing. "You were supposed to spot me. . .”

  * * *

  Will did something that day that he had done only once before, on the occasion of his brother's wedding: he called in sick. He'd been employed at the Nickel Ridge smelter since his middle teens, when his father, who at the time had been shift foreman, got him a summer job swamping out toilets. That rather unsavory task had taken him all over the sprawling industrial complex, from the starkly utilitarian administrative offices to the shafts of the mile-deep underground hive. But the sweltering, sooty, clanking environment of the smelter had immediately intrigued him. Something in its implacable toughness, in its crude and tireless momentum, had made him feel right at home. Within its coarse walls, the world and all its mundane concerns seemed to vanish in a sulfurous haze. From his first glimpse of the place—and his first unearthly ride as an apprentice engineer on the slag train—he'd known what he wanted from life. . . the same way he'd known what was in his heart the first time he laid eyes on Kelly.

  And until this morning, it had all been going so well. . .

  Will shifted his work light to a more functional perch and squinted into the Buick's dark underbelly. He'd been sprawled beneath the old girl's chassis for about an hour, tinkering distractedly with a bum shock absorber. In his present frame of mind, this was the last thing he should have been doing—he was more apt to screw it up than to fix it—but it beat going in to work, where his inattention might cost him a limb. Or his life.

  Cursing softly, Will lowered his aching arms and puffed warm breath into the grease-smudged bowl of his hands. If he had any sense he'd go back inside and slip into a nice hot tub with a beer and a paperback novel. It was colder than a dead man's heart out here, he couldn't concentrate to save his soul, and the task was far from pressing. The Buick had been up on blocks since early October, and it would remain that way until the middle of June at the earliest.

  He closed his eyes and heard Kelly tell him it was over.

  No she didn't say that she didn't say it was over.

  Not in so many words, perhaps, but as morning stretched into snow-blown afternoon, the truth work
ed its way home.

  Will damned himself for not having been more assertive. Kelly was obviously a mess. Maybe he should have tried to reason with her and to hell with his mother's advice. The guy she was stuck on was a goner, no future there, and although Will felt no animosity toward him, he wished the bugger would die. By the sound of it he had no life anyway, and Will swore that if he ever wound up in a similar situation he'd take every measure in his power to end it. But the guy—what had she said his name was? Peter? Paul?—had no power, no physical power, at any rate. The power he did have, an apparently unbreakable grip on Kelly's heart, seemed a mighty one indeed. But couldn't she see that it was hopeless? The guy didn't even want to see her anymore. And it had been years. . . Oh, Christ, why had he walked out with his tail between his legs? Why hadn't he spoken his mind?

  Because there had been a lot more to it, hadn't there. More than just the girl he was sweet on making love to him while thinking of another guy. That he could handle. That sort of obstacle could be overcome with love and patience and time.

  But how had he ended up on the floor with a bleeding goose egg and a boner still slick with her juices? Why couldn't he remember any of that? At first, he'd ascribed this lapse in memory to the crack he'd taken on the head. Memory loss was not uncommon with concussion. He'd suffered the condition once before, when he tumbled to the ice as a teenager, proving once and for all that he could not get the hang of ice-skating. The bump that time had been like this, split scalp and all, and to this day he couldn't recall the five minutes leading up to the fall, or the subsequent half hour. But the aftermath that time had been different. The long-term symptoms of concussion had plagued him for the balance of that long-ago winter's day and well into the following night—nausea, vomiting, headache, drowsiness, swirling black spots before his eyes. . .

  But this time there had been none of that. Only the memory loss. And it struck Will as inconceivable, even had his head been caved in completely, that he should forget, without a trace, making love to such a beautiful woman. And yet the evidence had been there: his erection, still glistening even as its anger subsided in the rude shock of being tossed out of bed; the unmistakable rush of an orgasm just spent; Kelly's complexion, flushed and glowing as it had been the evening before, that wondrous evening spent entwined before a crackling fire. And the dream he'd had just prior. The furious beating he'd taken and the sense that, in the instant before the intruder fell upon him, he was awake and that it was all really happening. . .