The Meridians

by Michaelbrent Collings

  The shrink was very understanding. Dr. Simek told him that post traumatic stress disorder was extremely common to those who had suffered a crushing loss like the one that Scott had suffered. So Scott nodded politely and stared at her inkblots and made sounds whenever she paused in an effort to get him to speak, but he knew that it was an act, like everything else he did. He wasn't getting any better under her care - that was the great part about being dead while alive: you didn't have to get better. You didn't even have to keep breathing, so anything you did was gravy.

  That was why his days had been numbered at the LAPD. Even as a desk jockey, there were too many people relying on him - on his accuracy and his diligence - for him to feel good about staying on. Sooner or later, he knew, he would screw up just as he had screwed up on the day his family died. Then there would be more blood on his hands, more ghosts in his mind, calling out to him in the night and asking why he hadn't saved them.

  Scott didn't want that. Couldn't handle it.

  So he finally gave notice after finding a different job. He was moving back to his home town of Meridian, Idaho, and was going to work as a teacher there. He was going to be the PhysEd teacher at Meridian High School, where the biggest problems would be the fact that half the freshmen didn't want to use public showers and the other half were eagerly trying to figure out how to get into the showers of the opposite sex without being seen. And those were things he could handle. Those were things where, really, no one's life was on the line. Where if he failed - and he had no doubt he would fail - no one would get hurt.

  He was packing now, packing to go from the home he had shared with Amy and Chad to one more suitable for a bachelor. As he carried a box full of toiletries to the growing pile of moving boxes in the front room of the apartment, he happened to pass a mirror, and grimaced. He stopped in spite of himself, though, and looked at his pocked and scarred face once again.

  Amy would have loved him, he knew. Even ugly, she would have loved him.

  He missed her. He missed Chad.

  Then all thoughts of his family fled as he saw something in the mirror. It was minute, just a dark patch in the glass, but as he looked, Scott could swear that the darkness was a shadow.

  Someone was in his house.

  Scott spun around.

  No one was there.

  Scott looked around. He felt like he was being watched, like there was someone else in the apartment with him. But there was no one to be seen. It was impossible, but his sixth sense, his cop sense, was ringing in a way it had not done since the day he lost his family.

  Then he heard it. The sound. So soft it was almost inaudible. The scrape of a shoe, the sound of someone sneaking up on him from behind. Scott whipped around.

  And there he was.

  Mr. Gray. But unlike Scott, who had aged two years during the time that had intervened since the death of his family, the killer appeared to have aged a lifetime. It was still clearly the same man: the same flinty eyes, the same receding hairline, the same gray suit with a ruined shoulder where Scott had shot him. But he no longer looked like a fit though unassuming man in his thirties. Rather, he looked like he was in his seventies or even eighties, an evilly grinning octogenarian with a face like death come to call. He looked, in fact, the way he had when Scott was in the hospital, during the strange dream where he was trying to kill a baby who then grew from infancy to adulthood in the space of an eyeblink.

  I must be dreaming. I have to be dreaming.

  The man smiled, and his teeth were snarled and yellowed. It was that fact that convinced Scott he was not, in fact, dreaming after all. Because while his mind might have cast up some image of guilt from his past, it would not have had the level of detail required to provide a view of oral hygiene long-neglected.

  The old man's face was a mask of scars. A multitude of tiny marks marred his face, the result of what looked like a bad collision with a plate glass window, and his nose looked like it had been badly broken years ago, and never properly reset. But for all that, he was still Mr. Gray.

  "Been seeing you," said the too-old killer. He smiled, as though he was telling a joke and expected Scott to start laughing at any moment. Scott did not laugh, mostly because in the same instant Mr. Gray raised his hand and Scott saw that the man was holding a razor-sharp knife in his hands. And that he clearly intended to use it on Scott.

  Scott screamed, and dodged to the side. But he knew that he was already too late; that he would never get away in time. And a part of him, he knew, didn't want to be in time. Didn't want to survive. A part of him wanted to die.

  But the animal part, the part of him that was not rational and never would be, that part didn't want to die, and so he dove as fast as he could even though he knew that as fast as he could wasn't fast at all, and certainly wasn't nearly as fast as the gray man who stood before him with dead eyes and bloody face.

  It wasn't even a contest. In an instant the man held his knife to Scott's throat.

  "Ah, ah, ah," whispered the scarred gray man, and Scott suddenly realized that there was something else different about him, in addition to the age and the scars: his eyes were not merely gray, not merely dead.

  They were insane. As though in the intervening months, in addition to aging a lifetime, the killer had seen things no human should ever see, and the sight of them had driven him completely, utterly mad.

  Scott looked at the old gray man. He was going to die. He knew it.

  And there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.

  "Been seeing you," said Mr. Gray again. Scott could smell his breath. It was fetid, rotten, the breath of something ill.

  The breath of the dead.

  "Close your eyes," whispered the killer.

  Scott did. He didn't want to, but he didn't see that he had any choice. A single glance into the killer's eyes was enough to convince him that he had no chance of reasoning with the man or pleading with him. There was only obedience.

  So Scott closed his eyes, and hated the feeling of helplessness that overcame him. He hated that he had fought through to life again after being shot in the stomach and chest only to die here, this way. Waiting for a madman to end him, a madman who had killed his family and whom Scott had in turn failed to kill.

  He closed his eyes. Waited.

  Waited.

  Nothing happened.

  "Shit," said the visitor under his breath. Then, as though speaking to himself, the gray man's voice said, "Do I kill you or him? You or Kevin?" He giggled, a high-pitched, hysterical giggle, and Scott felt a chill go through him. Kevin. The name from the note he had found in his home soon after returning home from the hospital.

  "Too tired to re-form like this," continued Mr. Gray. "How can I do it?" Another laugh, then: "Water. Water on the floor. That's what'll do it. That's what I see."

  And suddenly the breath was gone from Scott's cheek. The rancid smell that had accompanied the gray man dissipated.

  He opened his eyes.

  The gray man...was gone.

  ***

  13.

  ***

  The screaming continued until Lynette and Robbie took Kevin from the party. Until they did that, all the autistic children in the birthday crowd continued screaming at Kevin as though he were a warlock that they were going to stone. It was only when Robbie and Lynette took their son to the kitchen of Doris' house that the screaming subsided, like a wave leaving the beach with the tide.

  There was a window that provided a view into the backyard, and Robbie watched the children as Lynette dealt with Kevin. Kevin had not seemed to be aware of the tumult all around him, but had pitched an absolute fit when they tried to take him inside. It was only after they grabbed all his cars - and the two balls that had appeared as if by magic - that he consented to move from his space on the lawn into the house.

  The other autistic children were milling around aimlessly, as though their reasons and purposes in life had suddenly been stolen. It creeped Robbie out how fully and completely
they had oriented on his child, acting almost as though they were puppets whose limbs and vocal cords were all tied to the same strings, moving as one without any visible or aural difference in the timing of their pointing and their screams.

  "It's okay, Kevin, it's okay," Lynette was whispering beside him, though Robbie felt it was more likely she was saying the words for her own benefit than for Kevin's. The young boy was playing on the floor, cherubic face twisted in concentration as he lined up his cars, then put the two balls at the end of the line, then mixed them up, then replaced them in their earlier positions.

  "Kevin, honey," said Lynette. "What happened out there?"

  Robbie wanted to point out that their son had never spoken a word at all, let alone discussed the intricacies of autistic group behavior, but before he could a miracle happened.

  Kevin spoke.

  "Gray," he said.

  Robbie looked at Lynette with a look that, if it appeared anything like hers, included widened eyes and a mouth open wide enough that it was in danger of becoming the center of a newly formed black hole.

  "Did you hear that?" she asked. Then before she waited for his reply, she knelt down and touched Kevin lightly on the arm. "Honey," she said, removing her hand when Kevin started to shy away from her, "what did you say?"

  Kevin said nothing. He said nothing for long enough that Robbie started to wonder if he had really heard what he had heard. Lynette looked at him again. "Did you hear that?" she repeated.

  "Gray," Robbie said, his head starting to throb for some reason. "He said 'gray.'"

  "What does that mean?" asked Lynette.

  Robbie shook his head. "How should I know?" he said. He said it in a sharper tone than he intended, but he was suddenly very tired. Tired of the difficulties entailed with being the parent of a special needs child, tired of being a parent in general, and most of all tired of being expected to have answers to questions he didn't understand. It was all too much in that instant, too much work, too much loss, too much heartbreak. But then the moment passed. He suddenly felt a headache coming on, deep in his sinuses, like the mother of all hay fever attacks coming on in an instant.

  And Lynette screamed.

  Robbie turned in time to see the man bending down over Kevin.

  "Hello, little one," said the man. He was very old, and wearing a gray outfit, a suit that had once no doubt been quite costly but had been reduced in value by the muck and blood that spattered it and by the ruined shoulder that it sported. "Hello."

  The man's face was a latticework of old scars and ruined bones.

  The man reached out a hand and, almost tenderly, touched Kevin's head.

  Robbie was reeling inside, completely incapable of understanding what was going on. Where had the old man come from? What was he doing there?

  Lynette apparently was not gripped by any of the quasi-paralysis that afflicted Robbie, for she screamed once, loudly, "Kevin!" and darted toward her son.

  "Kevin?" said the man. He sounded amused. "Little Kevin," he repeated, even as Lynette moved toward him with the speed of a cheetah.

  Kevin did nothing, just continued playing with his cars and his two new balls in his usual stolid, focused manner.

  Lynette knelt down to scoop her son off the floor, and Robbie finally broke his paralysis. He, too, moved toward his son and wife.

  Before he could do more than take a half-step, however, the old man moved. He furrowed his brow in concentration, and said a few words that Robbie did not understand.

  "I can't kill the boy, but I can hurt him. I can hurt him forever."

  And suddenly, as fast as he had appeared, the man disappeared. But before he did, he swept his aged arm over the nearby kitchen island, knocking a glass of water to the floor.

  Robbie saw the glass shatter against the floor, saw the water pooling right where he was about to step, but he had no time to alter his movement, and stepped in the watery patch. It was as though he was experiencing the most powerful déjà vú in history, a sweeping tide of foreknowledge that he could see in its entirety but whose path he had no power to vary in the least bit.

  The water squeaked under his sneakers for an instant, and his arms pinwheeled in wide circles as he felt himself lose balance. His foot slipped out from under him, and in a way that was both slow as molasses and yet fast as blood spurting from a severed artery, he felt himself falling toward the kitchen island.

  Lynette screamed a single word. It was all there was time for. Just a single, anguished, "Robbie!" and then he felt his head hit the corner of the kitchen island.

  Falling from over six feet high, with his bearlike bulk propelling him with greater momentum than the body of a smaller man would have done, the fall was incredibly hard and powerful. He felt his skin puncture in a wash of blood, then felt the corner of the island go through his skull, shattering it with a crackle that resounded through his head in the instant that Robbie had left.

  And then all was dark.

  ***

  14.

  ***

  Lynette was numb. She felt like her mind was swathed in cotton, a layer of cloth that insulated her from seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling. In the short days between Robbie's death and his funeral, she had endured too many questions, too few answers.

  What had happened? Doris had asked. And Lynette had no answer, because all she knew of the moment she lost her husband was that it had been a moment of insanity; a second of complete loss. Similarly, the next few days swept past in a torrent of activity that was so overpowering it actually intensified her feelings of disorientation and disengagement. Just as a car, when driven slowly over potholes will jitter and shake, but when driven at a reckless speed will drive more smoothly, so the many details that had to be attended to with Robbie's death rendered her almost a wraith, gliding across the surface of her life.

  Robbie was gone.

  That was the one thought that kept recurring, that kept waking her up at night and kept her wanting to fall asleep during the day as an escape from its rhythmic pounding.

  Robbie is gone.

  Robbie is gone.

  Robbie is gone.

  A mortuary had to be contacted, the body handled, and Robbie is gone.

  The funerary arrangements had to be made, and Robbie is gone.

  Robbie is gone.

  Robbie is gone.

  Robbie is gone.

  Only Kevin seemed unaware of all the activity around him. As long as he had his cars and his two red balls, he was happy. Lynette hated those round red spheres, hated them for what they represented and the change in her life that they had wrought. Though of course they were in and of themselves neither evil nor even capable of any kind of action or activity, still she thought of them in the darkness of the night as being evil totems, mischievous spirits that had come to dwell with her child and in so doing had signaled the loss of her husband.

  The funeral itself was almost impossible to bear. Not merely because she had to say goodbye to her beloved Robbie, but also because she had to reject her pastor's offer to eulogize him. She had no desire to hear of the tender mercies of God when it was that same God who had stolen her husband from her, and stolen him most cruelly. She gave the eulogy herself, as much as she was able, though she broke down crying halfway through and had to be helped away from the microphone.

  Robbie was a much loved man among his students, among the Friends of Autistic Children, in their church, and in the community generally. So his funeral was a standing room only affair, full of well-wishers and grief-givers. But Lynette found no solace in the many hands that reached out to take hers; found no sharing of her grief possible, though many offered her their shoulders to cry on and to give them any of her burdens that they could carry for her.

  But that was the problem. There were no burdens that she could shift. She was a single mother now, and had to find some way to take care of herself while at the same time caring for a son who had been hard enough to care for when that was all she devoted her
self to.

  Luckily - blessedly, her pastor insisted, though Lynette continued to keep her own opinions about God and His blessings - Robbie had been well-insured through his job. The salary of a teacher was poor, but there were perks to be found in the benefits. He left her with just over two hundred fifty thousand dollars, which was enough to permit her some time to grieve, and some time to figure out what to do with herself and with Kevin.

  Kevin. He was asleep, his tired body not able to keep up with the single-minded intensity he brought to bear on every aspect of his activities. But sleep would not come for Lynette, no matter how hard she willed it. She kept reaching over onto Robbie's side of the bed, as though by doing so she could somehow call him back from the brink of eternity, could summon him to her side once again. No matter how often she reached over, however, she always found the same thing: an empty bedspread, cold and unruffled by her cover-hog of a husband. Finally, she took off her own covers and wadded them on his side of the bed, as though she were sleeping on one of the many nights where he had stolen the spreads from her. She shivered, and not from cold.

  How can I go on? she asked herself more than once as the seconds ticked by in the night that seemed like it must last forever. How can I do this without him?

  Each time she listened in the silence and darkness for an answer. Each time she was disappointed. There was no knowledge to be had in the deep, no enlightenment to be found beneath the light of a moon whose brilliance had seemed to fade in the last three days.

  Then her shivering changed. It was a subtle effect, hardly noticeable at first. Then she became aware that she was shivering, not with cold or with the repressed despair that had threatened to swallow her up at any moment, but with a kind of manic energy. It felt as though she had stuck her finger in a light socket and was now serving as a living conduit for energies so strong that they should have burned her out from the inside. Instead of scorching and leaving her a dried husk, however, the force that possessed her had energized her, changed her from a being enervated by grief to one wound up by an unseen hand, like a clock whose spring was coiled too tightly and was on the verge of breaking.