Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis

by P. T. Dilloway

  “How?”

  “We’re raising an army to fight her.”

  “An army?”

  “That’s right. An army made of the people like your friend Akako. You remember her?”

  “Yes.” Emma thought of the kindly Japanese woman who had been married to Aggie. They had a daughter—Renee. “What good can they do?”

  “Maybe nothing. But we have to try.”

  “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “You need to rest. You’ve been through a big shock. It’s still not over yet. You need to get your strength back.” Dr. Reed smiled and gestured to the plate of waffles. “Clean your plate, young lady.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As Emma ate her breakfast, Dr. Reed poured a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice. She put these on a tray along with a couple pieces of toast. “Joanna needs to get her strength back too. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Emma nodded. She nibbled on a waffle and thought again of those last moments. She had said goodbye to Louise and then become a baby. And then Isis had transported her back to Rampart City, only a twisted version of it, one in which Emma was a vampire. She had nearly killed Renee after she killed Jim—no, it wasn’t really Jim. It couldn’t have been. He had already died in Russia to get their daughter back. It had only been one of Isis’s puppets.

  She heard a crash from down the hallway. Emma got to her feet. She sprinted down the hallway. By the time she reached the bedroom she was out of breath. Her chest tightened again when she saw Dr. Reed beside the bed; she pumped Joanna’s chest to perform CPR on her. “Call an ambulance!” Dr. Reed shouted.

  ***

  Emma sat in the waiting room of Parkdale Regional Medical Center. Beside her, Dr. Reed sobbed into her hands. “This is my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let her do so much.”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I should have stopped Isis. Then none of this would be necessary,” Emma said.

  Dr. Reed had managed to get Joanna’s heart pumping again by the time the paramedics arrived. The little girl had been taken by ambulance to the hospital. While Dr. Reed had wanted to ride with her, there would have been no way for Emma to get there then, so Dr. Reed had drove behind the ambulance in her car.

  Now Joanna lay in the intensive care unit, though the doctors had yet to figure out what had happened to her. “I always knew this could happen,” Dr. Reed said. “It takes so much out of her every time she uses her power.”

  “She’ll be all right. She’s a strong girl,” Emma said.

  “I know. Much stronger than her mother.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. She’s always been such a brave girl. She’s like her father that way.”

  “Where is her father?”

  “He’s dead. He died before she was born. His name was Randall, but people called him Red because of his hair.”

  “Red? Is he—?”

  “No, he isn’t one of them. He’s the one who created them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a long story.” Dr. Reed sighed. She stared at the door to her daughter’s room. “It will be a few hours before she wakes up. So I guess I have time to tell it to you.”

  Chapter 26

  My name is Dr. Emma Jane Reed. I was born Emma Jane Earl on October 31, 1970. Like you I was born to Carl and Louise Earl and like you my birth was an easy one—or so Mom always says. She jokes that she wanted to have a second baby just so she could feel the same pain as her girlfriends that time around.

  I grew up in Parkdale in the same house as you. I lived there until I moved out to go to college when I was fourteen. It was what many would consider an idyllic childhood. Mom stayed home to dote on me and Daddy made enough money that we could live comfortably here in the suburbs. We never had to worry about gangs or violence or drugs; there was only a kidnapping when I was eight that prompted Mom to keep me indoors for two weeks.

  I’m sure you’re curious about what happened to my parents. They’re still alive. They moved to New Mexico once Daddy retired. They live in Santa Fe, where Mom teaches music at an elementary school and Daddy works on his golf game. Joanna and I go out to see them at Thanksgiving or Christmas; we alternate holidays between them and Joanna’s other grandparents, who live in Palm Springs.

  You’re probably wondering about the other people you know. Becky and I are still best friends, as we have been since kindergarten. Her mom was just as abusive here, but Becky’s managed to work through that to host her own political talk show on CNN. Of course here her name is Becky Scherr; she and Steve live in Washington DC with their three kids—all boys. We talk on the phone almost every day and Becky drops by a couple times a year; Joanna looks forward to these visits so she can play with Becky’s boys. (I sometimes worry that in a few years I’ll have to keep a closer eye on them, especially Becky’s oldest boy Alex.)

  Only a few other people in your life are in my life too. Aunt Gladys lives in Santa Fe with Mom and Daddy; she actually brought them out there. She owns a studio where she makes pottery; she always makes something to give to Joanna and I for Christmas. Dan recently retired from fieldwork and took a position teaching archaeology at Rampart State. I see him around campus, though we aren’t as close as in your world. I’m sad to say that Agnes and Sylvia are not here; from examining records in France they died well over four hundred years ago. Megan Putnam and Amanda Murdoch exist, but I’ve never met them, so I don’t know what they’re like.

  As you might remember from the last time we met, I’m a physicist here. My love of physics came about in a similar fashion to your love of geology. My parents took me to Harvard when I was twelve on a trip to Boston. The dean of admissions—who no doubt had seen my test scores—allowed me to sit in on a class, where a very young professor gave a lecture on quantum mechanics. His passion on the subject lit a passion inside me. After the class ended, I went down to talk to him. We discussed physics there in the classroom for two hours, until my parents came to drag me away. He invited us out to dinner that night, where we hardly touched our plates of spaghetti while we discussed physics until Mom broke in to say it was well past my bedtime.

  That young professor’s name was Dr. Randall Reed. “But everyone calls me Red because of my hair,” he said. His hair was the same shade as mine—and yours and Joanna’s too. He actually got the nickname from his Little League coach, who couldn’t remember his name and so would just shout, “Hey, Red, stop lollygagging and keep your eye on the ball!”

  After that dinner, Red and I kept in touch by a newfangled thing called Email. I begged my parents to buy me a computer with a modem so Red and I could talk without running up huge phone bills. In those days we didn’t really have to worry about pedophiles and cybersex and all those ads for penis enlargement and such that I have to screen Joanna’s Email for.

  Red’s interest in me back then was purely platonic. He was always kind of oblivious to those matters. To him I was just a very smart young girl interested in physics. I was the one who saw our relationship as more than that. I printed out his Emails to keep in my hope chest the way other girls did with love letters—Joanna has them now, since they’re about the only communication she has from her father.

  For two years I subsisted on those Emails. Then came time for college and of course there was only one school I wanted. Mom and Dad worried about how to pay for Harvard, but with my grades and test scores it wasn’t hard to get scholarships and grants to cover everything but personal expenses.

  For those I got a job as Dr. Reed’s assistant. The pay stunk, but I didn’t need a lot of money. The hours would have been terrible for most people, but as long as I could be around Red I was perfectly content. By that time he wore the goatee I had encouraged him to grow so that he looked like Dr. Benton Quest, who I had the biggest crush on when I was a little girl.

  The problem of course was that I was just fourteen and he was twice that. To him I was still a litt
le girl. It didn’t help that I was going through the most awkward part of puberty with zits and braces and had yet to grow breasts. The hours became torturous, especially because of the close proximity of our bodies.

  We first kissed when I was fifteen. Some sorority girls had invited me to a party, which I naively thought would be fun. It turned out to be a hazing ritual for a fraternity, where the new recruits were supposed to kiss the ugly little kid. Once I realized this, I ran to Red, who was my only friend on campus. He tried to comfort me and I kissed him. It was just a dry little peck, not much more than when Daddy and I kissed.

  Red wouldn’t let it be anything more than that. “But I love you!” I told him with all the passion of a fifteen-year-old. “I know you feel that way now, Emma, but you’re still young. You’ll find someone your own age eventually.” I didn’t take this well. I screamed at him, “I don’t want anyone else!” Then I tried to kiss him again, but he wouldn’t let me.

  The next day he fired me. It wasn’t really a firing so much as a reassignment to one of his colleagues—a female colleague. Dr. Gerritt was a very nice woman, but for the rest of the year I was sullen and withdrawn; I saw my work with her as a punishment. Red and I still saw each other, but he made sure it was in public settings where things couldn’t get out of hand. If I had been more experienced I might have sensed the real reason for this: he loved me too.

  It must have been even more torturous for him all those years. He loved me but he couldn’t have me because I was too young. While a number of people wouldn’t have a problem with this, Red would never do something like that. His heart was just as good as yours. So he bided his time and waited for me to grow up.

  For my eighteenth birthday my parents and Becky flew in to meet for dinner at the same restaurant where Red and I had gone. I thought I was cunning when I sent Red an invitation along with Dr. Gerritt and others in the physics department. I figured in public, surrounded by friends and colleagues, he would have to come. Then he would see I was a beautiful—and legal—young woman and we would sneak out back to neck.

  That didn’t happen. Red came to the party and he was very cordial. Worse yet, he brought his girlfriend with him. She was an old flame from high school who had moved back to Boston a few months earlier. For most of the party I envisioned various ways to torture and then murder her. To this day I still wonder if Red actually cared about her or if he hoped it would drive me to find someone my own age.

  I was willing to wait for him. I knew things with his girlfriend wouldn’t pan out. Red and I were meant to be together. We were soul mates. At this point I may sound like that crazy woman from Fatal Attraction, but I never boiled a rabbit in his kitchen or anything like that. I just bided my time and threw myself into my thesis.

  As luck or Fate or whatever would have it, Dr. Gerritt became pregnant, a minor miracle in that she was forty-seven at the time. When she took a leave of absence, Red became my faculty advisor. After I showed him my paper, we talked about it for ten straight hours. It was just like when I was twelve, only now we exchanged ideas in person, and he could love me the same as I loved him.

  He made the first move when he invited me back to his apartment to discuss my paper over dinner. With a lot of other teachers this might have been a cheap excuse to get into my pants. Red of course wouldn’t do that. We discussed physics long into the night, until 3am. He offered to drive me home. “Why don’t I just sleep on the couch? It’s only a couple of hours.” Being a gentleman, he slept on his own couch while I slept in his bed and basked in the musky scent of his sheets.

  We started to spend more time at his place and took turns with the cooking. At first we discussed just physics and school. Eventually our conversations turned to personal matters. I told him about my family, about how Mom had played the cello for the opera company and Daddy had worked there as a bookkeeper until I was born and he went to work for the big firm. He told me about his family, his mother the former beauty queen and his father the shipping company magnate.

  It was just a matter of time until we kissed again. Only this time he kissed me back. He confessed that he had loved me for as long as I’d loved him; it just took him longer to realize it. “We can’t let anyone know,” he said. “Not until after you graduate.”

  So we kept our love a secret. Or at least we assumed it was a secret; I suspect some of his colleagues knew, though we were fortunate none of them ratted us out. I completed my doctorate and he remained my faculty advisor right through until the end.

  To celebrate my PhD, we went out to dinner. There he popped two questions to me. The first was that he had received an offer from the Hastings Institute, the premier astrophysics institution in the United States. “If I take the job, I’m going to need an assistant. I was thinking of a certain brilliant young woman who just received her PhD and is looking for a job.”

  “Isn’t that nepotism?”

  “Only if we’re family. Otherwise it’s favoritism.”

  We leaned across the table to kiss. “Of course I’ll work for you,” I said.

  The second question was the more traditional one. “You know, there’s a precedent for husbands and wives to work together. The Curries for instance.” Being a traditionalist, Red got down on one knee to present me with the felt box. “Dr. Earl, would you marry me?”

  “Yes. Oh God, yes!” That was the happiest moment of my life, at least until Joanna was born. She’s my little miracle—Red’s and mine miracle.

  We got married in a small ceremony. Since his parents were wealthy, they wanted a big deal to impress all of their friends, but Red and I didn’t want that. We got married in the chapel at Harvard with just our immediate family, friends, and colleagues. I have the wedding album at home; Joanna keeps it in her room with her father’s Emails.

  For our honeymoon we visited Aunt Gladys in Santa Fe and then went down to White Sands. That was of course where they worked on the Manhattan Project. That obviously wasn’t the most pleasant destination; it was cursed ground for physicists, the place where our science had been perverted into something evil. Red and I wanted to go there to remind ourselves that we would only try to do good with our work.

  We rented an apartment downtown in Rampart City for the first twelve years of our marriage. We both wanted children—someday. But when we were newlyweds I had just begun my professional career and Red needed my help. So we used the pill, condoms, and a diaphragm to make sure.

  Then when I was thirty, we went out to dinner for our anniversary. I drank three glasses of wine to work up the courage to finally blurt out that I wanted a baby. It wasn’t so much my biological clock I worried about but Red’s. He was almost forty-five years old; in a twist of irony I feared that if we waited he might be too old to watch our child grow up.

  That’s when we moved to our house in Parkdale, just down the road from where Mom and Dad had lived. They offered their place to us, but I wanted something of my own—a house that belonged to Red and I without any ghosts of the past. We bought a very nice split-level, a good traditional home big enough for three or four kids if we wanted it.

  Luck or Fate or whatever you want to call it decided to be less kind to us this time. Try as we might, I couldn’t get pregnant. We went to Dr. Pavelski, who couldn’t find a problem with either one of us. I cried after this while Red was more reasonable. “It will happen eventually,” he said.

  Maybe it did or maybe it didn’t. The day of the accident, my period was a week late. I decided I would go buy a pregnancy test later and take it when Red wasn’t around so I wouldn’t get his hopes up. I never got the chance.

  For thirteen years we had worked on what we called “quantum particle theory.” I’ll save you the lengthy explanation, though I know you’d understand it. The short version is that we were studying how to replicate particles of matter. We’d experienced some limited success just a few weeks earlier when we reproduced electrons in a closed environment. It wasn’t a breakthrough that would put us on par with the Curries
yet, but we felt it was a start.

  I should mention that Red was always a cautious man, especially in the lab. He wasn’t the Dr. Jekyll type who would use himself for a guinea pig. He was never careless either; he always made sure to adhere to proper safety procedures.

  What happened was simply an accident. After we had experienced success in a very small environment, we decided to try to replicate a particle across the room. It wasn’t a normal room, of course; it was a special sealed room. We would operate our equipment from outside the room, where we would be safe.

  The first tests didn’t go as well as we hoped. We didn’t get the results we wanted. So after some discussion, we decided to make some small changes to the equipment inside the room. Being a cautious man, Red made sure to put on his radiation suit before he went inside the room to do the work. Before he did, he gave me a dry peck on the cheek. “We’re close,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  Given what happened next, I wish I had said, “I love you” one last time before he went off. But I didn’t. Why should I? I had no reason to think I would never see him alive again. So my last words to him were, “I’ll run diagnostics on the computers to make sure it wasn’t a glitch.” Not exactly Shakespeare there.

  I didn’t see what happened. One minute I was hunched over the computers to run the diagnostics program and the next the glass that separated me from the experiment room exploded. With the white light all around me, I thought for sure I had died. But I hadn’t.

  They never found Red’s body. There was nothing left of him. He simply dematerialized. Sometimes I think he might still be out there, in some other parallel universe, but most of the time I’m sure he died that day.

  It was two weeks later, when I realized my period still hadn’t come and I began to feel ill in the mornings, that I went to Dr. Pavelski and found out I was pregnant. Other than her father dying long before Joanna was born, the pregnancy was completely normal. Eight months later she came out of my womb, appropriately on October 31—my birthday. Since I couldn’t name her Randall, I named her after Red’s grandmother Joanna, whom he’d always talked about fondly.