Eyes, Love & Water
A novel by, Pamela Foland
Eyes, Love & Water
A novel by, Pamela Foland
© 2002 Pamela Foland
All Rights Reserved
Chapter 1
Life and Death
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Miranda swallowed hard against the icy lump forming in her throat. Anticipation was the worst part of the punishment. She wanted to run away, but that would only make things worse. Dichen had ordered this conditioning session because she had faltered in her obedience. To balk at her punishment could only worsen it. So, Nick led and she followed him down the hall to the room. Miranda couldn't completely escape the idea of running from her punishment, or the thought of how they would react. Perhaps Dichen would decide to supervise the conditioning personally. He was worse by far than Nick. Dichen was the master, the overlord, and lieutenant to the darkone himself. Nick was just an errand boy.
Nick opened the door with a wave of his hand. As far as she could tell, he had given over to the dark, never disobeying. It seemed like every door opened for him. Miranda meditated on that, she knew things would be easier if she gave herself over. She had even tried, but deep inside a hard kernel of something brought up bile at the thought of merging.
Nick stood impatiently beside the door; he wouldn't enter until she had. Trust wasn't in his vocabulary. It wasn't in hers either, but she knew what it was even without the word. She entered. The room was white with a bed, more a table. It held no softness. Metal cuffs and straps, in her size, hung and protruded from it. A crown of electrodes rested on a panel of switches. Obediently Miranda lay down on the table. She spread her legs to fit in the ankle straps; she cooperated with Nick and the cuffs. He cranked them tightly to the table. He slid the crown tightly over her head. They had cropped her hair unwomanly close to the scalp for better contact. Once he had seated it properly, he maneuvered it into a locking notch on the table. Then expertly, despite his youth, Nick jabbed an intravenous feeding tube into the back of her hand. That didn't bode well. Miranda wondered how long they were planning to keep her on the table if they felt the need for intravenous feeding.
Footsteps receded and Miranda was alone in fearful anticipation. What would they do to her this time? A frightened voice within wondered how long she could hold out, while her conscious, conditioned mind wondered why she wanted to. She had long since buried the source of that resistance beneath the reach of surface reason.
In flashes of intuition and sense memory, Miranda sensed something more than this unending crucible of training, conditioning and torture. Somewhere in her adolescent mind was a toddler regretting the uncontrolled and accidental use of power beyond her years. Somehow, the dark had found Miranda. They trained her as an assassin and a temptress. She was to be their weapon to aim and destroy, but they could not yet control her. She was Dichen's project, and failure of this experiment was not an option. To those ends, her education and up bringing was skewed. Hate, evil, destruction, were words with no menacing implications for Miranda, all were tied to power. Miranda knew ten languages, but more ways to kill than words for love, friendship, and peace.
Pain seared Miranda shocking through her, from where the headpiece contacted her bare scalp to every cell in her body, bringing the acute knowledge of pain. So, that was how it would be this time. Miranda tried vainly to brace herself against the pain, waiting for the droning litany extolling the rewards of obedience to begin and for the pain to abate. It didn't come. She endured the pain as it climaxed. Then out of what seemed the depths of her own mind, despite the alien taste, flowed violent, perverse images and sensations accompanied by a retreat of pain. The pain returned fiercely as the images flickered briefly to soothing calming ones like cool water or pure honest color. The images and sensations pulsed back and forth between pain and relief, peace and violence. In the pain, no time existed, yet the ebb and flow of the pain clocked eternity going abstractly by. Slowly? - Quickly? - The rage, and dark passion of the images built to shocking levels of depravity and with each increase in intensity the pain decreased.
So firmly did the invading images trap Miranda's awareness that, though her eyes were wide open, she didn't see or otherwise detect the ominous approach of the Darkone. Slowly insidiously his telepathic presence insinuated itself deeply in her mind. He was touching her thoughts intimately before she even noticed him, and only then, because the pain subsided as he approached. The pain herded her toward his never distant mental embrace. Instinctively she drew near to him, fully aware he was the source of the images, and worse. Her reward was a complete absence of pain, which flooded her with un-imagined pleasure as the endorphins her body had released to survive the pain shone out suddenly against a pain-free existence. It filled her with soothing emptiness.
That moment made it so easy to submit to him, except that deep within Miranda was a tiny kernel of resistance, it hunkered down somewhere near her buried regret. Prompted from within, by a true inner voice, Miranda pulled away from the Darkone, and back into the agony.
Almost as if because of her choice, the nature and her awareness of the pain changed. It no longer seemed to come from the headpiece. Instead, it seemed to come from within her body. Miranda felt her bones ache like growth, her muscles burning, and her skin stretching almost to the point of rupture. She wondered how the Darkone had managed to turn her own body against her, especially as the pain built beyond anything the table had ever inflicted. Miranda rejected the thought; the new pain didn't come from him. It was honest pain. The pain didn't drive or pull her toward him. It just was. Strangely relieved, Miranda felt herself losing her grip on consciousness. That stirred her. They would punish her if she didn't stay awake for the Darkone’s lesson. He would not be pleased. Almost heretically, it occurred to Miranda, that she didn't care if he was pleased with her. On that note, she let herself slip into painless, imageless, dreamless, unconsciousness.
Miranda awoke, still herself and separate from the dark. Her will was weak. Padded leather restraints bound her to a soft bed in a white room. Caked on mucus tried to hold her eyes closed. As she opened her mouth, she tasted her own dried blood on her lips, probably from a nosebleed. Her bladder protested in urgency, but she shoved the impulse to the back of her consciousness.
A man entered, dressed in the blood red coat of a med-center orderly. He was here to tend her. A relative simpleton, reading his mind was easier than trying to understand his speech would have been if he still had a tongue with which to speak. She easily lifted the memory of its loss from his mind, while there he brushed against her like a fly struggling against flypaper. Seizing control was effortless, but she weakened quickly because of her ordeal. Haltingly she relinquished her hold on him. He knew a little more of how she had come under his charge now, and would be more careful. As the orderly slowly regained control of his own body, he held a needle in front of her eyes. It was filled with an amber colored cocktail of muscle relaxants and neural sedatives.
Miranda knew what the man wanted to and would do once the drugs kicked in. Valuable time and opportunity wasted, Miranda steeled herself for an unauthorized “physical therapy” session. Even expected, the prick of the needle came as a shock. Miranda braced mind and body for the unwanted probing about to occur.
“Stop,” Dichen's voice broke through the sterile silence. Miranda gasped as the orderly quickly removed his hand from between her legs. “Not this one, she is being prepared for the dark one. You may 'play' with any of the others, but never lay hands on his property again!” Dichen's voice had fallen to a level that Miranda knew even she shouldn't be able to hear. The words and thoughts behind them left her in such turmoil that she let out a startled gasp. Dichen tu
rned all of his gaunt six and a half feet in stature to face her. His mind suddenly became a blank wall.
Miranda measured the effort the mental block cost him, by his slowed respiration and heartbeat. Wordlessly Dichen convinced the orderly of pressing business elsewhere. Like an automaton, the man walked jerkily from the room. The drugs began to take effect as Miranda's world spiraled down to a point, like the flushing of a toilet.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Detective Benjamin Kindel stared at the crime scene photos. The bodies of young women and girls were stacked like logs along one wall. All of them kidnapped, raped and brutally murdered. Ten girls had been locked away in a closet down the hall from the room full of carnage. Some girls said they had been nabbed by strangers in robes, but the rest couldn't remember how they had gotten there. They had found a few robed men, in a room nearby, dead apparently from self inflicted wounds. People higher up than Ben had officially closed the case, declaring it a cult mass murder perpetrated by the dead men, who supposedly committed ritual suicide when they saw the raid coming.
They had closed it, but it didn't feel that way. Even he only barely believed the truth and he had seen it with his own eyes. A human just couldn't cause carnage like that, and only five living people knew one hadn't. Ben had seen the creature, so had two uniformed officers. The other two witnesses were, Angela Daniels who claimed to be an FBI agent, and the teenage girl about to become victim twenty-one. The woman, Angela Daniels, had produced an unusual weapon and killed the creature. The body had disappeared. Now all Ben had to assure him that it had happened were the accounts of the other two officers; the victim, now residing within a mental institution; and Agent Daniels, who was nowhere to be found. Just this morning, Ben had contacted the FBI. The Bureau had confirmed the identities of half the dead victims. Some were from as far away as Indonesia. From the call, he had also discovered that special agent Angela Daniels didn't exist.
“Yo Bennie, are you going to just sit there all day? Or are you going to get off it to help put the bad guys away today sometime?” Ben could detect the barest hint of an accent in the man's speech patterns.
Ben flinched the file folder closed and looked back to see his partner of three weeks, “Yeah, Danny sure.”
“Good so we can go now?”
Ben stood and examined Daniel. Believing he had only known Daniel a month was hard. “What's on the books for today?”
“Nothing quite so interesting as last month, unless an alien is in the petty theft ring,” Daniel chuckled. The taunt stung, especially since it wasn't fair. “Come on, I have a source who dug up a lead.”
Ben followed Daniel to their car. As he stared out at the passing streets, Ben’s mind wandered back to the cult case. The memory of the rapist, a creature a demon, taunted him. It couldn't be real, but it was, but it couldn't be. . . . The words trotted through the back of Ben’s mind as he imagined the trauma the thing had inflicted on the girls. Whatever else it was; it was the last thing those poor innocent girls had seen. Traumas, traumatic, post-traumatic stress disorder, maybe that was why he couldn't let the thing go. Maybe it had traumatized him too. Ben remembered a vague sensation of pressure in his head right before the creature died. Yes, trauma explained so much. Maybe he had only transformed the rapist into a demon in his own mind, because he couldn't accept a human could be so evil . . . so dark. . . .
Daniel slammed his fist into Ben’s shoulder. The impact shocked Ben completely out of and away from his line of thought. “Wakey-wakey, Bennie-boy!” Ben forced his mind back into focus and examined his surroundings. They were in an alley; just ahead of the car was a group of boys frozen in the act of hauling TVs through the alley toward an empty warehouse. Daniel hopped out of the car and trotted toward the boys. It took a few minutes for Ben to grasp the idea he should be out there backing Daniel up.
Ben caught up with Daniel who was in the middle of growling sarcastically at the punk kid standing in front of him. “So these just fell off the truck.” Ben stood behind Daniel silently letting his partner do most of the work.
“Yeah!”
“Is that right? What do you say sonny?” Daniel asked pointing to a young man at the back of the pack.
“Nope Pops, the TV fairy left them under Johnny's pillow,” The boy answered to the raucous laughs of his friends.
“Really, which of you imps are Johnny?” Daniel asked. The boys backed away from a tall boy in his late teens. 'Johnny' grimaced and drew a switchblade, an action that was enough to cause both Daniel and Ben to draw their guns. The rest of the boys dropped their TVs and ran. Johnny started to take a defensive stance, but when Daniel cocked his gun Johnny changed his mind. “Up against the wall and spread um, you're under arrest.” Ben cuffed the kid, while Daniel read him his rights.
“Bennie, you still aren't all there, maybe you should take the rest of the day off. Get your head together, do some reading,” Daniel said as they secured the kid in the back of the car. The suggestion spurred in Ben the idea to do just that, he would go to the library and do some reading. Maybe he could find out just what the creature had been, in a book. “So, how 'bout it Bennie?”
“Yeah, drop me off at the library.”
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Miranda awoke in a cold sweat. The restraints were gone, and she was lying on a fresh white bed. Her slowly opening eyes were startled by a pure diffuse light coming through the translucent curtains covering a huge picture window. She rose from the bed, feeling a brief wave of disoriented vertigo. The room seemed distorted somehow, but more she seemed to be out of place in it. Immediately she noticed the smell of the air. It lacked the dueling smells of disinfectant and corruption. It was fresh and clean.
The air and light weren't the only things startlingly clean. Someone had cleaned up and dressed Miranda in fresh clothing. She looked down at the outfit. Tight, black, seamless, the fabric gave the impression of leather or vinyl, but was something entirely different. Able to stretch to fit King Kong if it had to, the fabric was like a second skin and didn't restrict movement. The outfit had a tank top, jacket, and a lower portion, resembling unified pants and boots. Zippers marked the placement of pockets. Possessing access to extra dimensions, the pockets held more than was naturally possible.
It was a uniform. Miranda knew what should be in each pocket from training sessions in similar uniforms of various shades of gray. This one was black; that made it the uniform of a Djheen, a bride of the dark one. Feared even by the most powerful of his minions, Djheens were. His eyes, hands, and vengeance.
Stricken with a terror from deep within, Miranda flew from the bed praying to find a mirror somewhere nearby. She found one in the bathroom. Her eyes bore into her reflection, and relief washed through her when she found her forehead still bare. Her relief was deep and profound at not having his red diamond shaped mark on her forehead. There was still hope! That internal spasm of relief brought conflict. A large yet superficial part of her beamed with pride at the achievement. The position was a high honor, lusted after by all.
She looked at the uniform, and her fear set her stomach spasming. After emptying it of bile in the toilet. Miranda went back to the mirror and the sink to wash her face. A towel on a nearby rod told her where she was, The Pax Hotel. She dried her eyes on the Latin word for peace and then they fell back upon the mirror. The reflection could have almost belonged to a stranger. Two feet taller and possessing all of the other visual clues of full physical maturity, very little remained of the girl she had been. She was fully a woman now. Her chestnut brown hair had grown back, now it swept her shoulders. Miranda could only think that she must have been in the conditioning room a very long time.
“Miranda,” Dichen called from the bedroom. She responded by instantly skipping the space between where she was and where he was. “He will be pleased by your responsiveness.”
“That is my wish,” Miranda answered undeceptively. She was of two minds, but she was
sure she could keep the disgusted half out of the way.
“As it should be. You by now realize the honor of his choosing. You and he will be one soon, but first he wants you to do a simple thing, to show him the length and breadth of your devotion and worthiness,” Dichen had raised her like a twisted parody of a father, now he seemed oddly proud.
“As is his will,” Miranda wrestled herself.
“You are to neutralize this man,” Dichen flashed her and image of a man, “The dark one so chooses because he interferes with The Vision.”
“Neutralize?” Even the cooperative portion was beginning to balk.
“Kill or otherwise eliminate, at your discretion,” Dichen answered.
“What did he do?”
“It is of no consequence. The Darkone wishes it done. You will do it!” Dichen turned a suspicious and probing eye on Miranda.
“As is his will.”
“You will find the man on the steps of the library across the street. He is a bearer of justice on this world so beware, he may have a primitive firearm.”
“What is his name?” Miranda asked, then after Dichen turned to look, “For final confirmation of target.”
“Benjamin Kindel, now go.”
She went, and it was as Dichen said. The man was on the steps of the library. She examined him closely for visual confirmation, coming lastly to his eyes. There she lingered. She had never heard the metaphor of eyes as the windows to the soul, but she discovered it deep in his gaze. In his eyes she found the words for the things she felt and had no words for; love, trust, friendship, peace. Miranda found meaning there too, the true meaning of power, discipline and honor. In his eyes, she finally saw her reluctance to give herself over to the dark for what it was. In his eyes, she lost herself and found something better. As she closed the distance between them, she memorized him; his sandy blonde hair, his dark-blue business suit, the bulge of his hidden gun, those honest steel blue eyes. He was young, no more than thirty. She wasn't sure what she would do, though every passing instant made her more certain of what she wouldn't do. In a less than obvious way, Miranda stepped forward, blocking his path.
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