by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Four
Chris drove slowly, leaning over the steering wheel and checking the numbers on Harrison’s note. He was crazy to be here. In all likelihood, Harrison was some serial killer with the grand modus operandi of luring chumps out to his abandoned neighborhood and then snuffing them.
He nearly missed the shack sporting what had once been an Eleven above the door. Most of the letters on the plaque had fallen off, leaving only the l and the last two es. He swung over to the curb and winced at the crunch under the wheels. Mike would extract the price of new tires in blood. Deathtrap though it was, the rusty orange Bug was the love of his life.
He cut the engine and sat there. A pallor hung over the street, shrouding it even in the heat of June. The buildings lay colorless and silent, like faces asleep from exhaustion. But if the other buildings on the street were asleep, Harrison’s was comatose. Glass jagged the windows against a backdrop of cardboard. The crumbling concrete steps looked like a ragged front tooth. Paint, once blue, had faded to a smutty gray.
He ducked out of the car and pocketed the keys. Probably, he should have told Mike where he was going. He had at least thirty pounds on Harrison, and this time he was more than ready for a fight, but this was the kind of neighborhood where people got mugged by their neighbors and were never heard of again.
Hands loose at his sides, he trudged to the picket fence. The gate creaked when he touched it, and the latch refused to budge. He shook it, and the whole fence wobbled.
In the window, a corner of the cardboard moved. For better or worse, whoever was in there knew he was here. Leaving the latch, he took a step back, braced one hand against the top of the gate, and jumped the thing. The cardboard in the window dropped back into place.
He threaded his way up the sidewalk, kicking newspapers and the occasional soup can out of the way. As he reached the top of the steps, a black pickup roared down the street, and a plastic bag skittered along the gutter. The truck cruised through a stop sign and continued.
The skin on Chris’s arms crinkled. At least somebody besides Harrison was alive on this haunted lane.
Whoever was inside the house apparently wasn’t going to voluntarily let him in, so Chris banged on the screen door, clanking the aluminum frame against the doorjamb.
A long moment passed—long enough that he began to figure Harrison had no intention of opening up. Then the door whooshed inward, and fingers clamped onto his sleeve and hauled him inside.
“You came.” Harrison, wearing an undershirt and rumpled brown slacks, shut the door. Without the trench coat, he looked even skinnier than before. The bones of his shoulders and elbows creased his pale, freckled skin. His hair flopped over his forehead and stuck up on top. A thin stink of body odor surrounded him.
Chris stood in a hallway that led all the way to another door in the back of the building. A smudgy darkness hung heavy all over the house, but he could make out waist-high walls partitioning the kitchen on the right side and a living room on the left.
A series of clicks issued from the door as Harrison slammed home a long row of deadbolts.
“Those supposed to keep me in?” Chris asked.
Harrison thrust the last bolt into place and pushed past Chris, headed down the hall. Chris hesitated, shot another glance around, then followed.
The house smelled like the dust from an unused air conditioner. How long had it been since a window had been opened in here? The moth-eaten drapes in the living room shut out any hope of light from the cardboarded windows. A ratty couch and chairs sat stolidly beneath piles of trashed paper plates and cardboard boxes. Mounds of books and notepads flooded the floor, leaving only a narrow path to the lone unencumbered chair.
At the end of the hallway, Harrison knelt in front of the door to unfasten another half-dozen locks.
Chris shifted his weight. The silence pressed in on him. “Listen, I just came here to see if—”
“Ssh!” With a flourish, Harrison unfastened the last lock, rose to his feet, and threw open the door.
The room inside didn’t even seem a part of the same house. Lit with the glare of fluorescent ceiling lamps and carpeted and painted in a grayish blue, it was practically blinding after the murk of the hallway. It was tiny, probably intended for a storage closet, but Harrison had crammed in a bunk, a camp stove, and a desk straining under an old giant of a computer. Sketches, maps, and scrawled notes papered the walls in neat fish-scale rows. Shelves near the ceiling held a collection of wood carvings and strange tools.
Chris stepped inside. “What is all this?”
Harrison slammed the door and turned around. “This is where I live. This is where I survive. I’ve spent the last twenty years here—searching for you.”
Chris shook his head. “I don’t get it.” He turned, surveying the room, until he was facing Harrison. “Why search for me?”
“You’re the Gifted, aren’t you? You’ve crossed, haven’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I knew you’d come to me after you crossed. You’d have questions, and I’m the only one who knows the answers.” He cackled.
“All right, you want to answer questions, try this one. How’d you know what I was dreaming? I didn’t start having those dreams until you sent me that letter.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” Harrison crossed his arms. “You’ve dreamt all your life. Did you never see me in your dreams? When you were a child?”
“Thankfully, no—” The word chopped itself off. A slivered memory stabbed his brain: the nightmare battles that had terrified him as a kid. Somewhere in his memory of those battles lurked a young man with Harrison’s eyes.
On a shelf, in between two crude wood carvings—one of some kind of winged lion, the other of a castle—glinted a foot-long cylinder of glass, spiraled inside like a strand of DNA. He picked it up and held it to the light. Inside, water ebbed and flowed, like the ocean against the beach. Tiny flames, orange at the tip, blue at the heart, licked up and down inside the glass and danced around the water, never devouring it, never extinguished by it.
He tilted it back and forth. The water and the flames tumbled over the top of each other, only to reappear, intact, at opposite ends of the glass. “What is this?”
“It is a fawa-radi, a fire-and-water sculpture. The great artists make them in Glen Arden.”
“How does it work?”
“How should I know?” Harrison’s thin chest puffed out beneath his undershirt. “I’m a Gifted, not an artist.”
Chris looked up. “What’s a Gifted?”
“You’re a Gifted.” Harrison scowled. “Don’t tell me you haven’t crossed yet?”
He gritted his teeth. He had been an idiot to come here. Harrison was cracked right down the middle, too far gone to even make sense. “Crossed where? What are you talking about?”
Harrison grabbed the sculpture. “You shouldn’t have come until you crossed. But since you’re here, I’ll tell you. One of these days you’re going to close your eyes and wake up on the other side of your dreams.”
“Right. Because I’m a Gifted.” He took a careful step toward the door.
Harrison shook the sculpture in Chris’s face. “People in this world don’t know it, but the human mind has two existences.”
Chris stopped in spite of himself. This was so ridiculous it wasn’t worth listening to. But he was listening. Didn’t his dreams feel real? Didn’t they feel like they could be as real as this life?
He caught himself and sucked in three deep breaths. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up as daffy as Harrison. “Just tell me what a Gifted is.”
“I was a Gifted.” Pride heated Harrison’s words. “One of the chosen who cross the worlds. We’re destined to change history! That’s our gift! Everyone said I should have been the only Gifted in her lifetime. There’s hardly ever two within the same century.” His face hardened. “But they were wrong. The Garowai told me. No one else, just me.”
�
�Who’s her?” But he had a feeling he already knew. Who else but the woman on the black warhorse?
Harrison propped one hand against his desk chair. “The Searcher.” His forefinger tapped the wood and a ligament in his skinny arm jumped. “She was just a child when she called me across.” His eyes glazed again. “Now she would be a woman. Twenty-nine.” His voice lowered. “What’s she look like?”
“Like she likes getting her own way.”
Harrison stared at the sculpture in his hand. “She was a strange child. Regal, aloof—a queen. I’ll never be able to forget her eyes. I’ll go to my grave with those eyes staring at me.”
That wasn’t a very encouraging thought. Chris gestured around the room. “Why all the secrecy? Nobody’s going to believe any of this dream stuff, even if you tell them. Why hide?”
“Stop being naïve. It’s not safe. Not for a man of my talents. I know too much. I’m too valuable to too many people.”
“And these people are . . .?”
“The government, the CIA, the Mossad—too many people to name.”
Chris tried not to laugh. “The government’s not going to buy this. Nobody’s going to buy it. And even if they believe it, why would they care?”
“It’s valuable, sensitive information.” Harrison held himself up straight. “They’d kill me for it.”
“If it was valuable, they’d keep you alive.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Turning on his heel, Harrison pushed the desk chair aside and knelt in front of a waist-high safe in the corner. “If anyone finds me, I’ll blow them up. I’ve got explosives ready under the floor, out there in the living room.”
Chris shot a glance at the closed door. “Explosives.” Harrison was just wacky enough to really have a wad of C-4 buried out there. Even worse, he probably would set the thing off if provoked. “Okay, I need to go. I only came to ask you if you knew how to make the dreams stop.”
“Stop?” Harrison crinked his neck around. “What kind of stupid talk is that? You’ve never seen a place so magnificent as Lael in all your sloppy city-born life. Most people’d give their life savings to see what you’re seeing.”
“No. They wouldn’t. Schizophrenics don’t want their hallucinations. People with dissociative disorder don’t want their multiple personalities. And I can tell you right now I don’t want these dreams. I’ve got plenty of problems already.”
Harrison jumped up. “You’re a Gifted, you fool! You could rule the worlds! Both of ’em! And I’ll show you how.” He whirled back to the safe, yanked open the door, and dragged out a double handful of spiral-bound notebooks rubber banded together. “They took my chance from me before I’d even been there a whole year, but I knew you were coming. I’ve spent the last twenty years making notes, plans, maps!” He shoved the notebooks at Chris. “You can rule Lael, and I’ll rule here. Two Gifted, side by side—we’ll be unstoppable.”
Chris pushed the notebooks back. “I’m sure this will come as a surprise, but I don’t want to rule the world. Either of them.” He started for the door.
Harrison lunged after him. “You can’t go.”
“Watch me.” He reached the door and unfastened the deadbolt. “All I want is the dreams to end. If you’re not going to tell me how to get it done, I’ll find somebody who can.” Hand on the doorknob, he paused. “Who’s this Mactalde you were talking about earlier?”
Harrison’s face paled to gray. “You stay away from him.” Spittle welled in the corners of his mouth. “Him and his threats and his grand plans and his high and mighty ways! If you go to him now, he’ll ruin everything!”
Chris looked at the maps scrawled in black on the wall. Harrison had spent his life constructing a fantasy, a delirium. “I came here for answers and all you’ve given me is nonsense. So thanks, but no thanks.” He pulled open the door and started down the dark hallway.
Harrison’s footsteps slammed the threadbare carpet behind him. “You’re a fool! A fool! Mactalde will destroy you if he finds you! Destroy everything!”
Chris reached the front door and started flipping the heavy deadbolts out of their sleeves. They smacked against the doorframe like angry ticks of a clock. Enough was enough. Whatever steps he took to reclaim his sanity were his own business. This deranged old man had no right to lecture him.
“Don’t you care about any of that?” Harrison’s fingertips stabbed Chris’s arm. “Don’t you care about the power we can wield?”
Chris hauled the door open and flooded the house with light. He turned back. “No, I don’t.”
Harrison leaned away. His mouth twisted.
“Listen to me,” Chris said, “the dreams are not real. They’re a figment of my imagination. For all I know, you’re a figment too. I’m going crazy, I’m having a nervous breakdown, I don’t know. But I want it to stop. I want it to end. And I’ll do whatever I have to do to make it end.” His breath came hard. “And it doesn’t matter what I do because it’s not real. This is the real world.” He pointed at the floor. “This is where we live our lives. What we do in our dreams, no matter how real they feel, does not matter.”
“Fine. Be that way. Be worse than a fool!” Harrison closed his hands into fists. Before he could swing a punch, he coughed and staggered back against the wall. A round, red hole appeared on the left side of his chest.
Chris jerked back. On the curb, tires squealed. The sound ripped through his mind and blasted him back to full speed. He dropped flat to the floor. Outside, a black pickup sped away from the curb. He batted the door shut.
Across the hall, Harrison clutched his chest as he slid down the wall. “I’m shot, I’m shot—” His pupils shrank into nothing.
Chris scrambled to his feet to catch him. He pulled him away from the wall, and a warm river of blood flooded his hand and arm. The exit wound had ripped through Harrison’s shirt, just beneath his shoulder.
“I’m shot, I can’t breathe! I’m shot—”
Chris gritted his teeth and tried to channel his thoughts. “Just take it easy.” As he lowered Harrison to the rat-eaten carpet, he fumbled his phone out of his pocket. He called 911, pinned the phone against his shoulder, and used both hands to rip open Harrison’s thin undershirt.
He’d gotten himself into a whole lot more than he’d bargained for right here.
_________
Ten minutes later, a police car, followed by an ambulance, arrived. After another half an hour, the detective finally got around to talking to Chris. Nobody seemed to know anything about what had happened. At any rate, not anything they wanted to tell him.
It was a whole hour more before they let him walk back up the street to where he’d parked the Bug. He had the key in the lock, turning it, when a footstep sounded behind him.
“Hey,” someone said.
He turned to look, and something hard smashed into the back of his head.
