by Dan Jolley
“No, I mean, I’d like to, really, but I have a ton of paperwork to do back in the office, and I should really get back to it, and—”
Janey pushed the bedroom door open, and Tim couldn’t help but look inside. His lips parted, slowly formed a small, perfectly round O, and Janey grinned. He stayed completely silent long enough for her to prod him.
“What do you think?”
Tim still didn’t answer, but moved to stand in the doorway, his eyes locked to the painting on the easel. Janey looked over his shoulder.
Predominantly golden brown, with splashes of blue and ice-white, “Pure Thought” was one of Janey’s favorites. The painting depicted a vast wheat field, out of the middle of which sprang an enormous tree composed of blue-white crystal. Cotton clouds decorated the azure sky, and both the clouds and the gold of the wheat reflected perfectly, thousands, maybe millions of times, from every crystalline branch, stem, and leaf.
She knew its effect, a total reversal from the unnamed piece Tim had seen earlier, and on a number of occasions she’d come close to selling it. She hadn’t, partly because she loved it too much, and partly because she’d felt, since its completion, that the painting was meant to be a gift. She just hadn’t ever been sure for whom.
His breathing grew shallow. “Ms. Sinclair, that is beautiful.”
She took a step inside the room. “You can call me Janey.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. She started to confront him about the hiding, but changed her mind; instead she left him there, with the painting, and walked slowly into the living room.
The apartment was small, yes, but a large picture window near the couch let in light from the storm. Janey pulled aside the heavy curtains, leaned against the frame and watched the clouds. Lightning flashed from one to another, electric veins of the sky. She let her eyes half close and took in the display.
Quiet thoughts nagged at her. You’re making a big mistake. You shouldn’t be doing this. You’re only going to screw things up.
But it wasn’t his fault. The painting would have spooked anyone. He’s not saying anything about it because he’s embarrassed.
Embarrassment doesn’t mean you hide like a peeping Tom.
Am I this desperate for human contact?
Something touched her arm, and she found Tim standing beside her. “What are you doing?”
Janey looked back out at the sky and the clouds and the rain. “Just watching the storm.”
An enormous bolt of lightning touched down halfway to the horizon, and moments later brittle thunder crashed. Janey smiled, and glanced at Tim. They looked each other straight in the eye, exactly the same height, and just stood there like that for a long moment. A moment no one could have engineered, a gift from nature.
At this distance, Tim smelled fantastic. She didn’t recognize the scent, some sort of after-shave, and she could only detect it from this close up, which meant he knew how to apply it properly. Lightning flashed, reflecting a heartbeat’s worth of sapphire blue highlights in his coal-black hair.
Janey wanted to slide her arms around him.
What am I doing?
Another blast of thunder exploded against the building, and all the lights went out. Tim jumped. “Damn! Sorry, I’ve got to get back to the office. Everybody’ll be screaming about the power.”
He turned to go, but hesitated, about to speak. Janey’s night vision revealed his eyes, huge and dark, on the line between deepest brown and true black. They left her without a coherent thought in her head. Tim opened his mouth, and Janey waited… but he seemed to think better of it.
He backed away, turned, and moved swiftly to the door.
Janey caught up to him as his hand turned the knob.
“Tim. If you’re interested...that is, if you’d still like to go somewhere—” Her throat threatened to close up. “—and chat, for a while, I’d like that.”
Tim didn’t respond immediately. His eyes drifted toward her bedroom/studio, but he seemed to realize that and hurriedly brought them back to her. “I’d like that very much. Can I—I’ll, uh. I’ll call you tomorrow? We can work out logistics?”
Janey smiled in what she hoped was a non-threatening fashion. “That sounds great.”
“Great, then.”
And he was out the door.
* * *
Later that night, Tim sat on the edge of his bed while his cat, a giant, fat gray tabby named Elmer, rubbed around his ankles and purred. He watched the animal, but thought of Janey Sinclair.
“All right, Tim,” he said quietly. “Try to be objective about this.” He attempted a mental list: Janey was 1) gorgeous, 2) talented, 3) intelligent, 4) mysterious. Her paintings in the gallery had touched him...intimately? Was that the appropriate word?
But she was also a little creepy.
Jeez, look at me, calling her names, after I’m the one crawling around her place.
He shook his head. No, not creepy, that word made him think of greasy-haired pedophiles. Janey was kind of...sinister? He remembered her face in the storm’s lightning.
And the painting, the horrible one she’d replaced with the crystal tree—a tiny sliver of his mind insisted that he’d only imagined that painting, since simple paint on canvas couldn’t do what that painting had done to him.
He remembered an H.P. Lovecraft story he’d read in college, “Pickman’s Model.” The artist, Pickman, had painted pictures of horrible, twisted creatures, pictures that drove anyone who saw them to the edge of insanity. But there weren’t any horrible creatures in Janey’s painting. Not any he could see, anyway. The horror was...inherent? Maybe that wasn’t the right word. Maybe saturated would be better.
Tim shuddered. He felt as if he’d been touched by some kind of spectre, as if the painting had been a sort of doorway into a dark, cruel place. As if it had swung wider and wider as he stood there. Could he spend time with a woman who’d created such a thing? Could he be exposed to more of it?
And for that matter, painting aside, how had Janey not known someone was in the apartment? He’d gone over it and over it, and unless she was the archetypal scatterbrain, she should have realized something wasn’t right when she found the door unlocked. She had to have come in from the outside; she’d dropped her keys there in the bedroom.
Tim didn’t believe Janey Sinclair was scatterbrained for a second.
He suspected he was missing something obvious, some perfectly sensible explanation for all the weirdness, but he couldn’t think of what it might be.
He picked up the cat and regarded him seriously. “What do you think?” The cat meowed in a way that Tim knew meant, “Please put me down or I’ll scratch you.”
He dropped Elmer back down on the floor. Tim shook his head and ran a hand through his curly hair. “The hell am I getting myself into?”
* * *
After spending four days with Garrison Vessler, Brenda Jorden was thoroughly sick of him. She’d discovered that, after so long with just Scott and Ned Fields there in the house with her, she’d grown accustomed to the relative isolation. Apart from her professional loathing of Vessler, now he was getting in her way and on her nerves.
Maybe if Scott had gotten more solid results from his nightly scans, Vessler would already be gone by now. But Scott hadn’t, and Vessler—“The Icicle,” they used to call him—decided to stick around and offer his own brand of misguided fatherly encouragement.
It made her want to retch.
On returning from a trip into town, she opened the front door and found Vessler standing in the kitchen, slicing thin disks off a pepperoni. Over his shoulder he said, “What do you like on your pizza?”
She hesitated, closed her gaping mouth, and said, “Doesn’t matter. Where’d your boys go?”
“I sent them to their hotel. I’ll stay here.”
She closed and locked the d
oor, bit back words. Garrison Vessler, standing in a kitchen in stocking feet, making a pizza, for God’s sake. Ever since he found Scott Charles he’d been on his way down. Down and out. She repressed a shudder at the thought of what might happen if Vessler were allowed to remain in charge of Redfell.
Jorden slipped off her own shoes and padded down the hallway to Scott’s room, where she opened the door without knocking. He lay on his bed, reading a magazine, and when he saw her his face went a little slack.
The magazine dropped out of his fingers as she sat down on the edge of the bed, and she plucked it off his chest and let it fall to the floor. For a few seconds the air around them filled with a scent, a heavy, musky aroma with an acrid undercurrent. Jorden touched Scott’s neck and the scent quickly faded. His eyes glazed over completely.
Jorden glanced out the door at the hallway, listened for approaching footsteps, and heard Vessler clanking around in the kitchen. She wrinkled her nose and turned back to Scott.
“You’re doing very well,” she said. He nodded, trancelike. “Do you remember the rules?” He nodded again. “Say them.”
He barely whispered. “Do what you say to do. Don’t do what you say not to do.”
“Correct. And what else?”
“Keep it our secret.”
“Right. And?”
“Act natural.”
“Very good. Very good. Now, it’s time to forget about this again and just be Scott. Ready?”
Nod.
Scott’s eyes closed. Jorden got up from the bed and went to the door.
He’d wake up in a few seconds, forget about today’s dose just as he had every other day’s dose, and be his usual neurotic, psychologically crippled self.
She closed Scott’s door, secure that her own energy signature would never show up on his screen. A few people knew—Stamford, Fields, a handful of others. Those who had to. Aside from them, her own augmentation, as well as the plans she had for its use, were none of the company’s business.
Brenda Jorden was born in Shinehull, Georgia, a barely incorporated little collection of truck stops, diners, brothels, and a few other meager businesses just north of the Florida border. Her mother, a prostitute, was knifed to death in the sleeper compartment of a tractor-trailer when Brenda was two, and Brenda went to live with her grandparents, who also lived in Shinehull.
Her grandmother, Leigh, was a petite brunette with pale skin and green eyes who waited tables in one of the diners. Leigh’s husband, Arthur, was a gigantic man with dark copper skin and arms as big around as most men’s thighs. Arthur worked as a mechanic.
On summer nights Arthur read Brenda stories before she went to bed, with a voice so deep it nearly shook the bed frame, and on each of those nights he promised her that he’d always protect her. She believed him.
Three weeks before Brenda entered junior high school, Arthur died of a heart attack. That night, Leigh got very drunk, took Arthur’s .38, and put a bullet through the roof of her own mouth and into her brain.
Due to a clerical mix-up, the county Department of Family and Children’s Services at first placed Brenda in a home for troubled youths, where a developmentally disabled girl named Ricki savagely beat her behind the school’s equipment shed.
Brenda spent sixteen days in a hospital bed before she was released into the custody of the first in a string of foster families. At the fourth foster home, a bowling pal of the father’s got high one night, came to the house when the parents were gone to a movie, and tried to rape her. When she fought him off, he apologized but, fearful that she would tell her foster parents, he stabbed her with a hunting knife and threw her in the deepest part of a nearby stream. A deputy sheriff named Jay Clives pulled her out of the stream thirty-two hours later and took her to another hospital, where she stayed longer this time.
That fall Brenda entered high school. Her class was predominantly white, and when a couple of the students learned her grandfather was black, they began a campaign of harassment that would last two straight years. Brenda found the words “nigger” and “coon” and “spade” spray-painted on her locker, on the ragged-out Lincoln Continental Arthur had left her, and eventually on the walls of her current foster home. Her tires were slashed. Students tripped her and shoved her in the halls. She tried to approach the tiny group of black students at the school, but they took in her green eyes and milk-pale skin and refused to speak to her.
Brenda dropped out after her sophomore year and took a job at a day-care center near the diner where Leigh had worked. She seemed to have a knack for connecting with children, and for a while thought she’d found her place.
A few weeks after her first night on the job, a man named Rafael approached her as she was walking to her car and offered her a chance to make several hundred dollars a night, without ever having to leave her room. When she refused the offer, he became violent, pulled a switchblade, and was about to use it when Jay Clives, the deputy who’d found Brenda in the stream, shot Rafael in the hand at point blank range. He’d been driving past and seen what was happening. Deputy Clives gave Brenda a ride home that night, since she was too shaky to drive.
Eight weeks later Brenda became Mrs. Jay Clives, and moved in with him to his double-wide trailer.
For a little over a year Brenda was genuinely happy, the first time since the day her grandparents both left her. With her income from the day-care center plus Jay’s salary at the police department, they were able to start a decent savings account, and talked about the possibility of having children. Brenda bought a book on crocheting, and tried to make a baby blanket.
But on a damp night in July, Jay Clives came home drunk, after losing his job as sheriff’s deputy, and demanded that Brenda have sex with him. He was loud and frightening, and when she pulled away from him he clubbed her on the side of the head, bent her over the back of a kitchen chair and took her forcibly.
They were just far enough away from the neighbors so that none of them heard Brenda’s screams.
Jay Clives adopted a different attitude toward his young wife after that night. He spent his days on the couch in their trailer, rarely without a bottle in his hand, and demanded sex both before Brenda left for work and when she got home. If she did anything to displease him, he shouted and called her “little nigger bitch.” At one point, angered because his eggs had gotten cold, he hit her with an electric skillet and broke her arm.
The Clives family stayed that way, with Brenda at the day-care center and Jay mostly on the couch, for two years and seven months.
Until one night the sky opened up and touched her.
It happened just past eleven, as the news was coming on, after Brenda had finished satisfying Jay for the fourth time that day. Raw and sore, as she seemed to be all the time, she put on a bathrobe and went outside to sit on the trailer’s back steps. She liked to sit out there if the weather was nice, look up at the stars and pretend she could still hear Arthur’s voice. Crickets chirped in the long grass around her, and a cool, gentle wind blew in from the west.
One star seemed to be particularly bright, and as she watched, it quivered and flashed like a small sun.
Something like a grenade went off in her head.
When she came to herself she was lying in the grass next to the steps, and her nostrils were filled with a pungent aroma, something she couldn’t place but which seemed terribly familiar. As she attempted to get back to her feet, the scent still filling the air around her, the back door slammed open and Jay planted one thick foot on the top step.
“’M hungry,” he slurred, nearly blind drunk. “Gitcher ass in here ’n cook me sumpthin’.”
Brenda locked her eyes on Jay’s. She slowly stood and climbed the steps toward him. She figured he’d grab her ass or one of her breasts as she passed and hoot or make a vulgar comment. The scent filled her head, saturated her brain, and she felt as though her feet barely made c
ontact with the rough wood as she climbed.
Brenda reached out, and smiled, and touched him.
The scent drained away out of the air, into him, and Jay’s eyes filmed over.
His jaw went slack, and he dropped the bottle of Milwaukee’s Best he’d been holding. It hit the floor without breaking, splashed beer on the cracked linoleum, and rolled out the door and into the grass.
Brenda said, “Get out of my way, asshole.”
Jay did as he was told. He backed up, turned, and cleared the doorway for her. Brenda couldn’t believe it—but neither did she question it. She couldn’t smell the strong scent anymore, but she still felt it in her brain, deep inside her, and it felt right. Everything felt right. She took her time going through the knife drawer and finally came out with one she’d won as a door prize at a county fair. It had a thick black plastic handle and a long, serrated blade. She thumbed the edge, flipped it over and handed it, handle-first, to Jay.
“Here. Take this.”
He did. Holding the knife, his hand fell back to his side, limp. Buzzing. Buzzing in her brain, like a million wasps, whisper compounding whisper till it became a roar. Somewhere in her mind she thought, what’s happening, why is this happening, what am I doing? But that wasn’t the part of her mind in control just then. Calmly, evenly, she said, “Jay, I think you should take off the fingers on your left hand now.”
Jay tottered, uncertain. Brenda said, “You can use the kitchen table, that’s all right.”
Jay loved that table. It was nothing more than particle board with an “oak veneer,” but it had been a gift from his mother, and Jay said it fit him perfectly. Brenda hated it.
Slowly but deliberately, Jay moved over to the table. He set his left hand on its surface and used the knife to chop off his fingers, one by one. Brenda smiled. “Good job, honey. That was real good.”
Jay held up the bloody stump of his hand, and tears began to roll down his cheeks. He made a small, high sound in the back of his throat.
