Dade seemed slightly annoyed at the interruption, asking, “What is it? We’re busy in the lab.”
“Well, Dade, you see,” The Sheriff started to explain in a hushed voice like he didn’t want anyone at the scene to hear. “I’m not sure if you remember, but you threw a rather high level executive off a cliff recently. And, since you practically announced it to the world and did nothing to cover it up, you have a visitor.”
“Who?”
“Just get down here,” The Sheriff said before hanging up.
Ann Marie was curious and didn’t heed Dade’s request for her to stay in the lab. “I knew this would happen,” she said while they were in the main elevator. “I knew that man’s family would come looking. I remember when this man got killed in my neighborhood in Philly and everyone knew who did it. People went after him and got him before the police could.”
“I doubt I’m in any danger.”
The elevator doors opened and Dade headed toward the Asylum’s front entrance. Ann Marie followed, keeping up with Dade’s brisk pace as they headed for the door. Across the courtyard, she could tell there was some commotion at the guard booth. The Sheriff was trying to settle down a woman who was hollering something in Spanish.
“Muerte del doctor!” she shouted. “Muerte del doctor!”
“What’s she saying?” Ann Marie asked Dade.
“How should I know? I barely learned to speak English.”
The yelling woman spotted Dade. She started crying and shouting with greater fury as she tried to push past The Sheriff to get to him.
“Let her go,” Dade commanded. “I have everything under control.”
The woman ran toward Dade as though she intended to knock him over like a linebacker. When she got a few feet away, she stopped short and just stared at him. Stunned by something in his appearance, she seemed to forget whatever plan she had for that morning. “You kill my husband?” she asked as though she had to commit the English phrasing to memory. “You throw him into ocean?”
“Yup,” said Dade. “Guilty as charged.”
“And you send money for my son and I to pay us off?”
“That’s also correct.”
“Per favor,” she said with her eyes welling up. “Thank you.” She took a step forward like she intended to embrace him. Dade retreated a few steps back and said simply, “I’m sorry. I prefer not to be touched.” Then he told her, “You don’t need to explain anything to me. I know what your husband was.”
“He bought me on internet,” the woman said.
“Well,” said Dade plainly, “now you’re free.”
He turned and casually walked back to the lab.
...
In the evening after work, Ann Marie walked through the doors of The Pink Pelican to meet her mother, who had been excited to share some important news with her. “I’m in love,” declared Lori Bandini with a smile so intense that it looked like it hurt. “Real love,” she said as Ann Marie slid into the booth. “With a real man and not one of the trashy punks from back home.”
“What are you talking about? This is the first I’ve hear about this.”
“What? Do I have to tell you every detail of my life as they unfold?” She asked her daughter. “I wanted to be sure about things before I told you.”
“And you’re sure of things with this guy?” Ann Marie asked without hiding any skepticism. “Did you ask him to move in yet?”
“Oh, stop it,” said Lori Bandini, who looked so happy that any negativity couldn’t bring her down. “I thought you would be happy for me.”
“I am, I guess.”
“Listen, you would really be impressed by him,” Lori told her daughter in a manner that bordered on a plea. “He’s super professional and charming. Did you know that he speaks six languages?”
“How would I?”
“Well, he does and he knows a lot about science too. I’ve been telling him all about my daughter, the genius mad scientist. He can’t wait to meet you.”
“I don’t know, mom.”
Her expression quickly turning sour, Lori Bandini let her menu fall onto the table. She leaned back in the booth with crossed arms. “I move across the god damned country,” she said without making eye contact, “for you. For your precious career, I give up everything in my life. You know,” she went on, “you came out of my body and I’ve done nothing but care for you for seventeen years. Children are never done taking from you. Don’t ever have one.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” answered Ann Marie, keeping her eyes on the menu in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” said Lori, surprising her daughter. “I know this is hitting you fast. We can talk about it later. I’m just glad to see my baby.” The waiter came over with a vodka and tonic that she had ordered before Ann Marie arrived. She took her first big sip before setting the glass down. “Why don’t you tell me about your day.” She said, changing the subject. “I notice you’ve been spending even more time with your friend, Dr. Dade.”
“We’re working.”
“Well, you seem pretty happy to be working all the time.”
Ann Marie shrugged her shoulders, saying, “I guess.”
“He’s handsome. I’ve seen his pictures on the internet. Kind of intense-looking but tall, strong, right up my alley. I don’t know about you.”
“Stop it, mom. Seriously. He couldn’t be less interested in stuff like that.”
“He doesn’t look gay to me.”
“Mom, he isn’t gay. He’s asexual.”
“He’s a man. There is no such thing.”
“It’s true,” Ann Marie, argued. “He’s evolved past stuff like that.”
“I still don’t believe it,” her mom said. A sudden twinkle appeared in her eyes and, in a matter of moments, she seemed perhaps two drinks drunker. “Take my new man. He’s a little older I guess. To be honest,” she added, “he’s considerably older.”
“That’s kind of gross, mom.”
“I would have thought it was gross too,” Lori Bandini started to confide in her daughter. She leaned across the booth and quietly said, “But this man has a way. Baby, he’s a wild animal.”
“Eww, mom. Stop it.”
Without acknowledging her daughter’s revulsion, she went on with just as much excitement. “I lose all control when I’m with him. It’s magical.”
Ann Marie noticed how happy her mother looked as she explored the recent memory of her new boyfriend. She fought the itch to roll her eyes and found herself wanting to be a good friend to her mom. “I’m happy for you,” she said, reaching across the table for her mom’s hand. “You deserve it.”
Chapter 11
The Shadow People
After an experiment one evening, while Dade Harkenrider recovered on the table next to the tank, Ann Marie admired the green crystals that had taken him out of his body. Sitting in the bottom of an Erlenmeyer flask in the laboratory fume hood, the little emerald needles looked almost alive, like some kind of bizarre, newly discovered sea urchin. Ann Marie stared at the tiny green shards in the liquid like she was the first person to set eyes on an alien spacecraft. She stared at the enchanted stuff as though it could disappear back into some netherworld.
Across the room, Dade’s eyes were closed as he continued to acclimate back to the real world. He spoke in a kind of gibberish, the way he occasionally did while he was unconscious, saying, “I’m sorry Ivy. I can’t help right now. Not now. Too powerful.”
His sleeping words got Ann Marie’s attention but she quickly focused back to the green crystals. It was almost as if the crystals themselves were speaking to her or beaming some kind of important message into her brain. Dade had warned her several times, in a manner even more serious than his usual, that the green crystals were totally off limits to her. She wasn’t allowed to put her hands under the hood because of Dade’s fear that she might expose herself. The material was so potent that the crystals had to be
submerged in liquid to ensure that not even so much as a nanoparticle could drift off where it could be inhaled.
Dade was still recovering in a deep trance when Ann Marie couldn’t contain her urge any longer. She pushed open the clear door to the fume hood and picked up a set of long tweezers. Getting as close as she could, she watched the green crystals glow and flicker.
She stuck the long tweezers into the opening of the flask, pinched one of the green needles and started to slowly draw it out of the flask. As the tiny shard broke the surface of the solution and hit the air, the glow got brighter immediately. She lifted the crystal up to her face to get a better look at it. There was something strange about the glow, a slow undulation in the light like the slow blink of a lightning bug.
Ann Marie was captivated and didn’t notice that the crystal was starting to change shape. It was starting to form a long dendrite, a needle much tinier than the crystal itself. It was on its way down the tweezers, toward the soft skin of her hand.
When she noticed the pinpoint of green light reaching down and touching her hand, she cried out, “Oh shit!” Then she grabbed for a bottle of laboratory water and started to dump the contents onto her hand. She hurried to the sink, where she scrubbed at her skin in the start of a severe panic. She thought that she could feel the green molecules slipping between the skin cells on her fingers.
Dade quickly came out of his trance when he heard the commotion. When he asked her what happened, she just kept scrubbing her hand. “What did you do?” He asked in a foreboding tone.
“It just grazed my finger!” she shouted. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Calm down,” said Dade, who was paying a great deal of attention to her eyes. Her black pupils started to swallow up her brown irises. “Just sit down over her,” he said in the careful manner of a nurse helping someone bleeding from the neck. Dade rolled over a chair and Ann Marie collapsed into it.
“What’s happening to me?” She asked, hearing her own voice sounding like it was running away from her down a tunnel. “It feels like gravity is getting stronger.”
“That’s normal,” Dade said. “Stay calm. Keep breathing. A small dose shouldn’t last long.”
Dade’s hair, which was damp with tank fluid, started to shimmer like extremely fine glitter. “You’re shining,” she said as she reached to touch his face. A smile, almost drunken, spread across her mouth and her eyelids began to fall under their own weight. “Your face,” she said touching it like a blind girl, “it’s shining.” Her expression took on a different, graver, character and her body stiffened up in the chair. “It’s getting darker. It’s getting hard to see.”
“It’s OK, Ann Marie,” Dade Harkenrider told her. The sound of his words brought a warm blanket of comfort over her body. It seemed to quiet the sense of alarm in her heart. The laboratory started to feel farther away with each heartbeat in her chest. “Don’t fight it,” he went on. “Whatever you see isn’t going to hurt you.”
She felt like she was falling backwards. Her eyes were closed and her eyeballs spun around under the lids. “Oh no,” she said. “I’m falling. I can’t stop falling.”
“That won’t last long,” Dade told as he checked her accelerating pulse at her neck. Her eyes were clenched tight.
When the falling stopped and the darkness stopped spinning, she felt a warm buzzing start in her chest by her heart. Rainbows and white flashes, light that had its own textures, started to flow out from her abdomen like a broken fire hydrant. The light filled the darkness around her until she was looking down on the Asylum Laboratory from perhaps three hundred feet in the air.
She could see the tops of the palm trees swaying in the breeze and a few seabirds sitting on Dade Harkenrider’s personal deck. When she looked hard enough at the lab below, its walls became transparent.
She could see an x-ray of all the floors, pipes and machines and after a moment, the x-ray turned into a clearer image than she could have gathered with her own eyes. Her mind could penetrate the surfaces and move effortlessly over every detail.
Floating above Palos Verdes, Ann Marie felt a loud hum like the cross between a trumpet and an air raid siren. The sound, inaudible at that moment to anyone but Ann Marie, seemed to shake the entire sleeping hill below. It made her deeply afraid and she immediately wished for something to make sense again. The sound coalesced in front of her into a black fluid like crude oil. The sound shook her body like the driver on a speaker and she started to cry.
The crude oil finish of the thing began to turn to untextured blackness like a shadow. The shape of the thing contorted until it became hundreds of different human shadows. The living silhouettes started to fight, fornicate and argue in an incomprehensible language. Then all the shadows stopped and faced Ann Marie like they had only just noticed her.
In the outside world, Dade Harkenrider applied a cool wet cloth to her head as her body flexed and jerked. It looked as though her mind was in the grips of the most profound nightmare. “Don’t worry about them,” Dade whispered to her. “They’re mostly just curious. The other side doesn’t get many visitors from here. You probably look very strange to them.” Ann Marie didn’t show any sign that she had heard him but Dade acted as though he was getting through.
Still bobbing on what seemed to her to be an invisible fluid, Ann Marie hovered over Palos Verdes, watching the orgy of shadow people in front of her. She heard the horn again.
This time it was louder and it hit her like the shockwave of a nuclear blast. The shadow apparitions scattered and disappeared into the dark nooks and crannies in the landscape below. It seemed to Ann Marie that they were fleeing in terror.
A soupy mist began to develop around her as though she were a passenger jet passing into a cloud. The grey vapor started to collect, then coalesce into something solid. The nebulous thing started to suck in all the mist as it seemed to gather mass. Ann Marie felt some pressure drawing her toward whatever it was. Suddenly, two crevices opened up in the shape and became eyes. Black smoke swarmed into lines on its surface.
Ann Marie was staring at the monstrous tattooed boy’s face. With nothing else perceivable in the mist, the face had become the entire universe. It studied her with a mixture of fascination and lust. She tried not to panic, finally hearing in her mind Dade’s message from a few minutes earlier, telling her that she was safe.
While the thing stared at her, she realized she couldn’t feel her heart beating. Her heart, along with the rest of her entire body, was gone. When the face started to lick its lips at her, she screamed so hard that it woke her up and she was back on the steel table.
“You’re back,” said Dade, looking down on her tenderly.
Her eyes darted around the room, taking in everything to prove to herself that she was indeed back in the lab. Then she threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him like a python. “That was incredible!” she shouted while she held on tight. “I should have listened to you but that was amazing!”
“Damn right you should have listened to me. But I suppose this was inevitable.”
She suddenly remembered the face she saw. “A child,” she said. “A child with a tattooed face. The same one I saw on my first day of work. MoneySexPower! That’s him. It’s the face of the tattooed boy.”
“It’s very old.”
“Is it the devil?”
“I don’t believe in such concepts,” said Dade. “MoneySexPower is an intelligence, something that has been part of the Earth for a long time. It works through humans, usually just by influencing their desires and actions. However, in some cases, it can form a kind of symbiosis with a group.”
“Or a child?”
“The child is the victim,” Dade said, “which is nearly always the case. The coven is helping that parasite latch itself to the boy.”
...
Ann Marie left the laboratory that night and continued to feel strange. She felt lightheaded starting up the car. She thought she saw
a shadowy figure in the parking lot on her way out. The thing seemed to disappear when it touched her headlight beam. As she circled her way down the hill, the moonlight felt brighter and warmer than it should. The green ferns and bushes looked especially alive, almost as though they were pulsating or breathing.
She made it to the bottom of the hill and entered the freeway. She thought she saw people waving to her from behind one of the streetlights. They were insistently pointing down the road like they wanted to show her something important. As she drove, she saw more black figures, something like silhouettes, everywhere along the road. Shadows without any apparent substance were waving at her and trying to get her attention. If she looked at any one of them too long, it seemed to just disappear.
The shadow people all seemed to be directing her somewhere.
...
At the same time, across the city, the coven stood around an empty indoor swimming pool at an abandoned LA high school. They were all robed in black and one of them, the albino nurse, was holding hands with a small boy. Behind them, filling the small stack of bleachers around the pool, dozens of homeless recruits watched with great anticipation.
“This place smells,” the little boy complained to the nurse. “I want you to take me home!”
“Stop it!” The albino nurse said as she grabbed the boy by the collar. “I told you your parents were already mad at you. That’s why they sent me to pick you up. They’re tired of you and they’ve had enough.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe it,” she scolded, before taking on a more tender tone with the boy. “I didn’t want to have to tell you this. But, the reason your mom and dad starting having me look after you, the reason they made me your babysitter, is that they wanted to give you to me. Your mom called me herself and said that she couldn’t stand being your mother anymore.”
The little boy looked very upset. Just as she was about to say something else, her phone rang and she picked it up right away.
Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) Page 18
