by Aric Davis
The third rumor is that the Nazis in Berlin know the war is over and they will need Jews who will say positive things about the camps, perhaps to tell the courts of America and England that the ovens were for burning the dead who passed from sickness, and that the camps were a misguided attempt to save Israel’s people from the fury evident in Germany since Kristallnacht. I find this hard to believe, but the fourth rumor is the one that truly terrifies me.
The fourth and final rumor I have heard is that the Fräulein is looking for magic—old magic that Hitler believes some of the Jews may still have. This rumor terrifies me, because what else fills my head but magic? When my mother died, I heard her screams. I felt her inability to catch her breath. I was there, but my mother was nowhere near my side. I know that if the Fräulein is looking for magic, she is looking for someone like me.
I am not vain enough to think that I am the only person in the world who sees like I do, but I do think that we are rare and that perhaps the Nazis have discovered our abilities and wish to use them. If that is true, I am torn between the urge for self-preservation and my desire to aid in no way whatsoever those who killed my family. It would be easy to convince the Fräulein that I could be special, but I would rather die than help these men. So my mission is simple, even if it finally sends me to the ovens: I must convince Fräulein Kaufman that I am nothing but a little blind girl, poor little useless Ora.
CHAPTER 9
1999
Cynthia woke alone. She was terrified, had no idea where she was, and then it all came back to her. The apartment, divorce, affair. All of the packing at the yellow house, and Mom’s tears, and then a pretty tasty pizza dinner before being put to bed.
It wasn’t morning yet. It was dark out. Cynthia heard someone yelling and then a group of people laughing in response. Everything about this apartment was different than the house on Glenwood, where Dad used to say that their street was so quiet you could hear a mouse fart. Thinking of Dad gave Cynthia a sick feeling in her stomach, like maybe she had betrayed him by coming with Mom, but it wasn’t her fault. No one had even asked what she wanted.
That thought changed quickly to another one: Dad hadn’t exactly been chasing after the car. Maybe he wanted her to go away. Maybe he never wanted to see her again. Cynthia loved her dad very much, but if that was true, how could she go the rest of her life without seeing him? Mom had said that she would always get to see both of her parents, but she didn’t feel that either of them were particularly trustworthy at the moment.
Cynthia heard another noise outside—a dog barking—and then the sound of something metal being tipped over. Curious about what the dog might have been barking at and about the dog itself, Cynthia crawled from her bed and peeked over the windowsill and between the vertical blinds.
At first there was nothing visible but streetlights, but slowly the nighttime world of the North Harbor Apartments came to life as her eyes adjusted to the yellow glow. Unlike the suburbs, North Harbor appeared to come alive at night. Cynthia could see the fat woman with the laundry basket from earlier, now sans basket and kids, and she was drinking a bottle of beer and talking to a too-skinny woman. The two of them sat in a pair of old folding chairs and had a case of beer between them, but both looked as happy as could be.
Turning from the women, Cynthia could see a group of teenagers walking out of the parking lot and toward the road. It was late, but apparently not too late. Still, Cynthia felt sure the kids were just out and about, not up to anything in particular, and that thought made her wonder about the dream from the night prior. Cynthia let that thought slide from her mind—it was an ugly and sad thing, a bad memory she wanted to forget.
Cynthia heard the dog bark again, closer this time, and she stuck her forehead into the screen and looked down, where she saw Mrs. Martin. Cynthia gave her friend a wave—and Mrs. Martin was a friend, Cynthia was sure of that—even though she knew that the unseen wave wouldn’t be returned.
Watching Mrs. Martin and her two dogs, Cynthia felt an itchy feeling on her arms, almost as if she were wearing a sweater that wasn’t agreeing with her skin. Cynthia scratched at herself—not hard enough that Mom could have ever seen—and when she looked at Mrs. Martin again, she saw what had to have been there the whole time. Mrs. Martin was sitting in an old lawn chair with the handles of Stanley’s and Libby’s color-coordinated leashes stuck through a chair leg, but that was nothing new to Cynthia. What were new were the strands of green thread that Cynthia could see ever so faintly stretching from Mrs. Martin to the dogs, leashes of another kind entirely.
Cynthia backed away from the window and rubbed her eyes, but when she returned to it the strings were still there. They were glowing a beautiful golf-course green, and to Cynthia they were both some of the scariest things she’d ever seen and the most wonderful. The strings at Nan and Pop’s had been a deep red—not the color of blood, but close. These green strings were vibrant and electric, and while the red strings had made her feel scared, these made Cynthia’s heart feel as if it were singing. Cynthia wanted to run out of the room, down the steps, and into Mrs. Martin’s arms. Surely her new neighbor had to be seeing these things as well, but that was impossible. Cynthia sat at the window watching Mrs. Martin smoke her oddly floral cigarettes instead, smiling as the blue smoke permeated the screen in her window. All she could hope was for a chance to ask Mrs. Martin about where the dancing green strings had come from and what they meant.
Cynthia faded to sleep still propped on the windowsill, the world around her emptying even of its late-night critters and guests. As North Harbor finally grew quiet, Mrs. Martin went inside, Cynthia snored away the sleep of the just, and below her two dogs growled as a man with a red string trailing from his head crossed the parking lot.
CHAPTER 10
Jessica stared at Frank in his cell through the two-way glass that looked like a mirror inside of his room, and shook her head. Somehow, impossibly, Frank had gotten even bigger, and she’d only seen him a couple of days ago.
Frank Rosenbauer was a reluctant war hero of both theaters of combat in the Second World War. He was a dangerous TK, and he and his late wife, Edith, also a TK, had once sold the Soviet Union nuclear secrets that Frank had stolen from a four-star general’s head. Ever since then, Frank had been a guest of the TRC, which was doubly beneficial for the government. Frank was too useful to be executed, and his bizarre powers made it impossible for other TKs to use their abilities when they were kept within a few hundred yards of the man. The most amazing part of this skill was that it wasn’t something that Frank channeled to make happen; rather, it came off of him like an aura that couldn’t be turned off. Looking at him today, Jessica felt sure that the last of Frank’s days would be coming soon.
Frank had always been big, but in the years since his wife’s death he’d grown to enormous proportions and despite his controlled diet was still increasing in mass. Pretty soon it won’t matter how disagreeable you are, you big lug, Jessica thought to herself, and it was true. She didn’t think it was possible for Frank to be ordering his cells to make him fatter, but it wasn’t exactly impossible, either. Frank had spent his entire life proving people wrong.
Finally, having seen enough, Jessica opened the door to Frank’s room and walked inside as the door closed after her. Frank regarded her with eyes that were both hungry and lazy and then grunted a greeting.
“Hi, Frank,” said Jessica. “I need to talk to you about some stuff, so let’s keep it friendly, all right?”
No response.
“Frank, I’m serious. We need to talk. I need your help.”
No response.
“Frank, goddamnit,” said Jessica. “Do you want me to cut off your food, maybe have somebody kill the electric in here?”
“No, of course not,” said Frank finally, his voice a wet rasp that made it sound as if he had a mouthful of soup. “I need my electricity for the computer, and you know I need my
food.” Frank grinned—it was an awful mask of flesh and excess—then said again, “You know I need my food. You’d never take that from me.”
“I wouldn’t want to,” said Jessica, “but I need your help right now. If it makes it any easier, just think of it as helping yourself instead of doing me a favor.”
“Your dad asked me for help,” said Frank. “I helped him, too, and look where that got me.”
“Let’s not play dumb. You came home a decorated war hero, and then a few years later you gave the Russians the bomb.”
“I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.”
“I am, Frank, always,” said Jessica. “What I need is your cooperation, maybe a few parlor tricks for someone from Washington to verify that you’ve still got it, and then we can prove our worth. There might be more later, possibly even some time outside, but for now I just need my friend Frank to show off a little bit.”
“I’m too old to do a mission—too old, fat, and weak.”
“I’m not asking you for that right now,” said Jessica. “All I need is for you to buy me some time. Everything else that might come later you can say no to. But I need this.”
“No. I’m not your dog jumping through hoops, and I’m not going to waste what’s left of my life trying to convince someone that there’s more to this than there is. There are no more telekinetics out there to be found, Jessica. The ones who had the sight are on drugs, they’re drunks, they don’t see the magic, they see a shrink. I’m the last of my kind.”
“Cut the bullshit. That’s a bunch of crap, and we both know it. There are plenty of TKs out there left to find.”
“I can’t help you.”
“You won’t.”
“The words don’t matter.”
“What if I made you a deal?”
“To release me?”
“To find Katarina,” said Jessica. “To bring her back here.”
“You can’t make a deal like that. If you could find her, she already would be here.”
“That’s not true, but to try to locate her, I’m going to need time, and only you can give me that.”
Frank sighed. “What kind of ‘parlor tricks’?”
“The usual,” said Jessica, feeling the lifting of a weight from her chest that had been threatening her for months. “A two-man, maybe some RC work. You know, the usual.”
“How about I do the two-man and then have your government man start diddling himself for everyone? Better yet, I can have him yank his eyes out. Maybe slit his throat for an encore.”
“No,” said Jessica, doing her best not to sink to his level for once, to have a conversation with this evil piece of shit without letting it go to hell, like he wanted. “No, no need for any of that, Frank. I just want you to do some silly bullshit that will be as hard for you as tying my shoes is for me.”
“Did I ever tell you how I met my wife?”
“You haven’t,” said Jessica, her interest piqued. As far as she knew, this was a story that no one at the TRC had ever heard.
“I was living in North Carolina then, grifting my way up and down the seaboard and having some wonderful times with the young women there,” said Frank. “This was shortly after your father and my trip to Japan—a story in its own right—and I fancied myself quite the dashing young gentleman.”
“Hard to believe.”
Frank laughed. “Oh my, yes it is,” he said, “but true all the same. Anyway, as I mentioned, I was having fun with the young women there, and after a few good times things got even better. The press was calling me the ‘Ham and Egger’ because I had killed a pair of waitresses from a diner, and even though I hated the name, I felt like I’d finally made it.” Frank coughed—a wet, nasty sound, like someone shaking a fistful of change in a half-empty jug of water. “Every good killer had a name then, of course, just as they do now. Those murders are still unsolved, by the way. Of course, they never will be solved now. Will you look them up on your computer tonight, Jessica? When you can’t sleep and you’re thinking about how blessed you are that I can’t reach into your head and make you my little marionette, will you read about my adventures?”
“No,” said Jessica. “What does this have to do with your wife?”
“We’ll get there, we’ll get there,” said Frank. “All in due time, my dear. You will read about this, though, won’t you? You simply must. It was by no means my masterwork. That took place in Berlin—wish I’d known at the time that I was at my peak—but it was still very good work. Anyway, I had enjoyed several girls very much, including the two from the diner who made me so famous, when I saw Edith walking down the street. I was smitten instantly, I had to have her, and of course I did, but not in the way I was thinking.”
“You couldn’t bend her. I get it.”
“No, of course I could,” said Frank. “You had her here for years, God rest her soul, and you know as well as I do that I could bend her whenever I chose. Anyway, I decided right then and there to park the car and to make this girl come with me, damn the consequences and full speed ahead. So I parked and followed her into a store, and when I walked in I saw that there were three people there—Edith, the clerk, and an old biddy—and all of them were standing in place, their eyes locked straight ahead. The clerk was emptying the register into a flour sack, but no one was speaking, and then there was this voice in my head. I remember it like it was yesterday.
“‘Hold still,’ she said, and I about doubled over laughing. She had a strong bend to her—the strongest I’d encountered at that point besides my own—but I was just beyond amused. Who could plan on such good fortune? I told her to get the money and follow me, and that’s exactly that—the rest is history. I will admit, however, that she did not agree with the idea to sell the plans to the Reds. It was one of the only things that we disagreed over, and of course she was right.
“Anyway, I insist that you look into the adventures of the Ham and Egger. Do it tonight when you’re sleepless, just like I said, and then come back here and tell me what you think of my exploits. A portrait of a young man as a serial killer, if you will.”
“Why, Frank?” Jessica asked after a pause that had grown into a third trimester. “Why would I want to do that to myself, to read the details, if I can even find them on the web? I know what you’re capable of. I don’t doubt any of this.”
“I want to know if you can solve the riddle,” said Frank slowly. “I want to know if, based solely on the evidence left when the Ham and Egger took on a partner, you can tell when Edith began to have fun with me.”
“And what if I do?”
“If you do your homework and get me the answer I want, I will do your parlor tricks.”
CHAPTER 11
The three days stretched to five. Five days of arguing and sweating, Darryl and Terry treating each other like a couple of dogs that know they don’t like one another and know exactly why. Terry was as sweet as he could be, and then he was just as poisoned as Darryl. The mood was death, scabs being pulled off too slowly and too soon, but it was necessary. All Darryl could think about was booze, and when he dreamt, he had both a bottle in his hand and a strand of black and purple threads growing from the top of his head. On the fifth morning, he woke covered in sweat in the porno room. Darryl walked to the bathroom, pissed, and looked at himself in the mirror. Growing from the top of his head and fluttering in the wind from the air conditioner were strings.
They were red, yellow, and green, but there was no black to be found.
Now you know. No black yet. So maybe this time you stay dry. It was a good thought, a healthy one, but it wasn’t going to happen. Darryl knew from experience that after a few days of staring at the threads in the mirror and poking through the heads of others he’d be more than thirsty. That was the cycle and had been ever since he’d been old enough to get alcohol. Darryl ran his fingers through his hair, thinking about th
e first time he’d seen the strings.
He’d been ten, and they’d been glowing bright red. Darryl saw them in the reflection from the school bus window, and he knew why. Some kids were being mean to his friend Terry again, beating on him in the back of the bus, and that was only going to get worse when the two of them got off at their stop. Darryl knew what would happen if he tried to stop it because he’d tried to stop it before—they’d beat on him, too. The last time he’d had a tooth loosened and his eyes blacked, and then three days later his old man had come back from an onion run, trucking in the South. Dad had a temper—that was never a secret in the Livingston household—and when he’d asked his son how the other guy looked, Darryl knew he was in for it.
Dad wouldn’t care about Darryl’s weak little fatboy best friend, just like he wouldn’t care about how many guys there were, just like he didn’t care about how many rotten onions were on the back of the truck as he fueled himself on white powder and CB static while driving across southern Florida. Dad would care about the beating his son had taken, and he would care about why his pussy-bitch boy couldn’t defend himself. “I’m not raising you to be some faggot,” Dad had said on more than one occasion, including a particularly memorable week where Mom had been visiting her sister and Darryl had been all but convinced that was exactly what his father wanted from him, and those words echoed in Darryl’s mind on that school bus as he stared at himself and the odd red things in his reflection.
Helping Terry would mean a beating from the kids on the bus, and then it would mean a beating when he got home. Dad wasn’t even off running onions or anything else. His old man had the week off and was probably working through a few bottles of Tropical Golden Ale at this very moment. As mad as Dad got when he’d seen Darryl a few days after that earlier beating, Darryl couldn’t even imagine what his old man might have to say when his boy came home in a ripped shirt, dripping snot, blood, and tears. Darryl broke his gaze from the window, heard the sound of a boy yelping in pain, and left his bag and seat behind him.
