by Sean Platt
The boy flinched as Paola’s hands hovered near his gaping wound.
“I’m not going to touch you,” she whispered, her palms inches above the white bone bulging through his bloody flesh.
Warmth spread through her body, and her eyes instinctively closed. As a dizziness stirred inside her, Paola felt like a swaying boat rocking back and forth in stormy seas. She fought to stay steady, afraid she would accidentally brush against the boy’s injury.
“Hey, what are you doing?” the dad yelled from behind her.
Paola heard him running toward them as she fought her dizziness, refusing to open her eyes or turn around until she felt like she was done healing the boy.
Her heart pounded like a jackhammer as panic filled her like blood.
“What the … ?” the man cried out.
She opened her eyes, turned to see him, frozen and staring wide-eyed at his son.
Paola turned, slowly, her heart in her throat, and looked down to see what the boy’s father was startled by.
The bone was gone, and the boy’s bright-pink flesh looked like new skin over a healed wound.
Oh, my God, I did it!
“How … how the hell?” the man said, stunned, stammering on his words.
“She fixed it, Daddy!” the boy said, pointing at Paola.
She found her feet, then ran, as if there were bleakers behind her.
* * * *
CHAPTER 7 — Mary Olson
Mary stared at the tree on her monitor, wondering if it should be burnt orange rather than leafy green. She was adding finishing touches to her latest line of greeting cards — the best of her life, and also the easiest. Her new stuff was admittedly darker, and had been since her return to work, but Mary’s clients — mostly museum gift shops and high-end boutiques — had never loved her art more. She referred to this latest batch of drawings, her most abstract by far, as Screaming Trees. They were composed of smudges of color, smeared in bursts above rigid trunks. Mary stared at the tree some more; the more she stared, the less she liked green.
She selected the trees’ green layer on the Cintiq and began to go over the color in orange. It was immediately better, though now she would have to adjust other layers with light and shadow effects to harmonize the orange. The extra time would be worth it. Mary would always rather take longer and inch closer to perfect than put out something she wasn’t in love with.
She was in the middle of erasing stray marks when the phone startled her, buzzing on her desk. She picked up her cell, stomach churning at the number: Paola’s school.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Olson?”
“Yes?” Mary said, dreading whatever was coming.
“This is Mrs. Waddell from Kingswood Country Day. Is Paola home?”
“Um, no, she’s at school … isn’t she?”
“No,” said the voice. “Not since fourth period.”
Mary turned to the clock. It was well into seventh, Paola’s last class. “And you’re just now calling?”
“Sorry, Mrs. Olson, we’re short staffed and … ”
Mary cut her off, hating excuses. She didn’t spend $15,000 a year for short staffed. “Are you saying you don’t know where my daughter is?”
“No, which is why I’m calling, Mrs. Olson. Is there a chance somebody else picked her up, or maybe she left early with a friend?”
“How the hell should I know?” Mary said, looking around her living room as if something might point her toward Paola. She leaped from her chair and ran up the stairs, into Paola’s room, just to make sure she hadn’t come home and gone to bed without telling Mary, as unlikely as that seemed.
Paola wasn’t in her room.
Mary’s heart pounded faster; her breath became shallow.
Her mind flashed back to the Drury, when Paola had wandered off in the middle of the night and had been infected by The Darkness. She and Desmond had found her at death’s door. Paola probably wouldn’t have survived without Luca.
What if it’s here and has come for her again?
Mary ran her hand over her face, squeezing her cheeks and then her eyes, wondering what she should do. This wasn’t like Paola at all. Sure, she tested boundaries, but this was different. Mary couldn’t imagine her doing something so drastic without a good reason.
What if something happened to her?
What if she started to age in class, or worse?
Oh, God.
“What’s the last class she was in? Did you speak to the teacher? Did you talk to her friends?”
“Her teachers, yes,” the woman said, “but not her friends; not yet. We’ll get on that right now. Is there someone we should ask specifically?”
Mary tried thinking of Paola’s friends, but the girl hadn’t made too many since they got here. She listed the few to hit her memory, and apologized for not knowing more, feeling Mrs. Waddell’s silent judgment.
“We’ll call you back soon,” she said. “Meanwhile, you might want to call some friends, or maybe the police.”
Mary thanked Mrs. Waddell, then hung up, sitting at the edge of Paola’s bed, paralyzed with indecision. She wanted to get in her car, go out, and search for Paola.
But what if she comes home while I’m out?
Shit.
Mary was grateful for their move to Colorado; the girls needed a clean break from their past. But it had yet to feel like home. As she grazed the phone’s side with her finger, running it from top to bottom, Mary realized she had no one to call. As she wondered if she could feel more alone, Mary heard the front door open downstairs.
She leaped up from Paola’s bed and ran toward the hallway, eager and frightened, praying that Paola was OK.
Mary froze at the top of the stairs, staring down to the front door with her eyes saucer-wide and jaw to the carpet. She dropped her phone. It fell as if in slow motion from her hand, bounced two steps, then spilled through a slat on the banister. It crashed to the floor and shattered to pieces.
Paola stared back at her mom, sobbing. Mary’s precious 13-year-old was gone: in her place, a woman she did not know.
* * * *
EPILOGUE — Roman Rosetti
Manhattan, New York
1994
Roman sat in the dark, cradling a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, and his service pistol in the other.
The phone was on the bed. He watched it … waiting.
Roman had called and left voice mail for three of the four other men in his unit — the men who had all shared that something in Alaska so many years ago. Whatever they touched had somehow enhanced their lives, all except for him.
The something had left a famine inside Roman, a deep ravine of shadow that dragged him down into its horrible depths whenever he was alone, trying to sleep, or live any sort of normal life.
It waited — a forever-present voice in the back of his mind, poisoning his thoughts, and everything he tried to touch or dared to love, filling him with an unending dread that could only be defeated through self-medication, and only for minutes at a time.
The pills and alcohol had finally stopped working. Roman’s life now circled the abyss, inching closer to the bottomless pit by the day. Roman could feel the others, the rest of his unit — Renny, Otis, Will, and Norberg — out in the world, living their happy fucking lives and forgetting all about him.
Roman wondered why none had called him, not ever. If he felt them, they must have felt him, too. They must have known his pain, or at least had some idea. Did they still hold grudges, for shooting at the thing which had blessed their lives and cursed his? Did they feel guilty? Or worse, pity, for him?
Is that why they’re not calling back?
I should just do it. Screw goodbyes. Not like I owe them shit.
For some reason, Roman couldn’t do it, not without letting at least one of his old unit know why. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to explain himself simply to tell someone what he was feeling, or if he wanted the men to feel guilty, as if they were somehow re
sponsible for what had happened to him.
When Roman used logic, rather than the years of bitterness, to think things through, he knew it wasn’t their fault that Jenny left him. It wasn’t their fault that he couldn’t hold a job. It wasn’t their fault that his only friend in the world now was the old man behind the counter at the liquor store, a guy named Joe. Fuck if Roman knew his last name.
No, it was that something’s fault. Whatever it was they found. Or whatever it was that found them.
It had changed everything, without rhyme or reason, or the slightest of cares. It had taken what was once a minor, manageable, depression and turned it into something destructive enough for Roman to burn through nine shrinks and God-knew-how-many antidepressants trying to just make it through the day.
The other guys grew stronger, leaner, smarter. They even had a bit of extrasensory perception, allowing them to see things every so often. Like Will always could, even before. The men saw nothing so grand as winning lottery numbers, but the something had somehow peppered their lives into something better. Yet, whatever they found in the cave hadn’t improved Roman; it ruined him instead. He also sometimes saw glimpses of the future, but only the bad stuff, the worst stuff. Stuff no one should see: murders, rapes, bombings, and the rest of the horrors that haunted the blackness behind his drawn lids.
His visions might have served as a gift to mankind, if Roman were able to identify, find, and stop such atrocities from happening before they did. But alas, the visions were a curse, because he was never given a clear enough picture to stop anything.
Roman was always too late, and the visions constantly grew worse.
He had to tell someone else from his unit, to let them know that he did try to live with it, and had tried to help. He just wasn’t strong enough.
Roman had called all the men except one. Will Bishop was left.
He took a swig of Jack, then set the bottle on the nightstand beside the dim, lighthouse lamp, which cast the room in the shade’s amber glow.
He dialed the number from memory, even though he’d not called Will in a long time, if ever.
The phone rang five times.
No answering machine.
Fuck it. I can’t wait any longer.
Roman decided to hang up and silence his life, before he again chickened out and woke for another miserable day in the morning.
As he went to hang up the phone, he heard a voice on the other end.
“Hello?” Will said, his voice a million miles off, and yet somehow right there.
Tears streamed Roman’s cheeks at the sound of his old friend.
“Will?” he said, barely able to bury emotion as it splintered out from his broken voice.
“Roman?”
“Yeah, buddy, long time no see,” Roman said, trying to work his way from casual to, “I’m going to kill myself and this is why.” He opened with small talk, asking how Will was, what he was up to. Seems Will had finally found someone, which was good. Even though Roman wasn’t keen on queers, he liked Will, and figured he had no reason to give a shit what two people did under their own comforter.
Roman listened to Will for a while, trying to find the right opening to bring up what he was meaning to do. But Will wouldn’t shut up. He kept rambling. First about his boyfriend, then about the book store they owned, and then on and on about current events. It was almost as if Will wanted to talk about anything but Roman.
What the hell, bro?
Roman tried to interrupt, to bring the subject around to the bad times he’d been having, and his ultimate decision.
Will stopped him. “I know what you’re thinking of doing.”
“What?” Roman said, surprised, even though he probably shouldn’t have been. If any of them could see into his thoughts, it would be Will, who had psychic abilities before they found the thing in Alaska.
“Listen, Roman, I don’t know what to say that will make things better. I can feel your pain. I was about to call you, in fact, I felt your pain so intensely that I knew I had to call, but then you called me. You can’t do it, man. You can’t kill yourself.”
Roman tried to respond, but instead cried a pathetic-sounding mewl. He felt like a pussy, shaking his head and wanting to say sorry for crying. He couldn’t make words, though.
“It’s OK,” Will said, his voice soft, comforting, reassuring, like a father, even though they were close in age. “But you’re going to feel better. Trust me.”
“What do you mean?” Roman asked, “Did you see something in my future?”
Will paused, maybe considering his next words carefully in case Roman could smell a line of bullshit delivered. “I didn’t see anything, specifically,” he said. “But I feel it. I feel things will change for you. Soon.”
“I wish I could believe you,” Roman said, squeezing his hand around the gun, bringing it up to his temple.
I should do it right now — let him hear me shoot my brains out. Let him live with that! See how happy his life is after that!
Instead, Roman asked something he didn’t know was inside him, though it bubbled to the surface so fast it had to be there all along.
“Do you ever think about going back?”
“Back where?” Will asked, though Roman figured he was playing dumb.
“To Alaska, to find that thing.”
“No,” Will said. “I think it was good that we couldn’t find it again, and that we didn’t report it.”
“Why?”
“I think you know why. We saw something bad inside it, both of us, buddy, something we couldn’t tell anyone about. Hell, you did shoot at it, and it knocked us clear the hell outta that cave, right?”
Roman laughed, forgetting how good it felt to have lightness inside, even if only for the length of a cough.
Will laughed, too. “Shit, you were crazy as hell back then, man. Remember that time you banged that lieutenant’s wife, then sent him the Polaroids just to rub it in his face? You were an Everest of balls.”
Roman kept laughing, suddenly feeling stupid for holding the gun.
Will said, “It feels good talking to you, buddy.”
“You too, Will.”
They talked into the wee hours, until laughs turned to yawns and Roman’s bottle was empty. He finally let Will go, and after he hung up, stared at the phone, and his gun, which had found its way to the nightstand.
Roman decided not to kill himself.
He had a better plan. He wasn’t sure how he could do it, and it would likely take a while, but Roman knew with a sudden and unflappable certainty: He had to go back to Alaska.
He had to find the something that had ruined his life.
TO BE CONTINUED…
YESTERDAY’S GONE
::EPISODE 21::
(THIRD EPISODE OF SEASON FOUR)
“Victims”
* * * *
PROLOGUE — Marina Harmon
October 19, 2011
The J.L. Harmon estate
Marina stared at the doorknob to her father’s bedroom, trying to summon enough energy to reach out, grab it, and twist.
Just go inside, shut off the camera and end this nonsense!
He died on Oct. 15, just as he’d predicted years before. A video camera had been stationed in his room the past four days, recording and broadcasting live on the web, where his followers and naysayers alike waited to see if his prophecy would come true.
Marina’s father had sworn he would rise again, two days after his death, with a message from the Great All Seeing. While he may have predicted his death years in advance, which she had to admit was an eerie coincidence, Marina did not think he was some prophet who would rise from the dead. He was only a man, who had manufactured a religion that had fooled too many people … Marina included.
And now she was left with his billion-dollar empire, in charge of leading a religion for which she had no faith. It was as if her father, who knew of her doubts, had claimed the last laugh — he’d saddle her with his legacy, forc
ing her to fake her way through the rest of her life. He probably figured that even if she didn’t give a damn about his legacy, she was too smart to walk away from millions of people willing to hand over their money, tax-free, and in perpetuity.
As she stood at the door, trying to summon the courage to enter his room and kill the charade once and for all, her rage began to boil.
I don’t need his money. I ought to go in there and turn to the camera and scream the truth. “My father fooled you all. You’ve been duped. All of you. Victims of fraud.”
She could take his estate and set up a fund, pay off anyone who wanted their money back, until his well went dry. Marina didn’t care, she just wanted to finally be finished — done being the daughter of J.L. Harmon. She didn’t want to live her life in the spotlight — her every move, her every romance, her every failure serving as fodder for the press and critics of the Church.
He’s gone, and now I’m finally free.
She reached out for the doorknob when Dr. Phillips suddenly appeared at the end of the hall.
“Marina,” he said, “what are you doing?”
“I’m going to check on Dad. See if he’s back yet.”
“We have monitors on him,” said her father’s longtime personal doctor, “And staff downstairs monitoring 24/7.”
He stared at her like a vulture afraid his prized, golden goose was getting eyed by an eagle. The old man wore dark circles that only made his brown eyes look beadier, and hungrier. She couldn’t wait to close the Church, fire the “good doc” and every one of the sycophants who had leeched off her father for years.
Marina knew she’d be vilified for her plans after her father was finally declared dead, once and for all. The worst part was that nobody would ever recognize her actions as kind, they would see her as a bitter daughter, never understanding the countless sacrifices she had made when returning to California, helping her father when he first fell sick five years ago. Marina could have done anything with her life. She had dreams of using her years of school to manage an ad firm, but shelved those dreams to help her father further his own.
