Ionic Resurgence: Book Two of The Doll Man Duology (Volume 2)

by Howard Hachey

  “Do you need to see the nurse, Kieffer?” Adler asked with just a hint of sympathy in his voice. “You don’t look so hot.” The other students in the room noisily turned in their seats to look at Kieffer as he sat propped up like an unwrapped mummy behind his desk. He looked as if he might fall apart at any minute. His face blank as sharp cheese; eyes sunken and flat like two shallow graves.

  Kieffer, still not speaking, shook his head and bent to grab his creative writing notebook and a pen from his backpack. Sensing that pushing the issue would get him nowhere, Adler took another few moments to eye Kieffer suspiciously before turning back to the whiteboard.

  “Like I was saying,” Alder went on with his favorite forest green marker in one plump hand, “Steinbeck utilized all the classic themes and ideas of his literary predecessors, yet managed to modernize them in such a way that made him one of the most important contemporary writers of the early nineteenth century. In a scene from the classic Of Mice and Men, the character Slim, a tall, shadowy ranch hand, could be interpreted as a symbolic representation of God. Slim, omnipotently wise, is something of a vague force that quietly advises George while…”

  Ashley heard the words, but they meant nothing. Her gaze was fixed on the empty shell of a boy sitting at Kieffer’s desk. She watched as the familiar phantasm copied down what was already on the board, hands shaking and head bobbing with each stroke of his pen.

  Unable to stand not knowing any longer, Ashley slid her phone out of her front pocket and scrolled through the short list of contacts until reaching Kieffer's number. With Adler’s back to the room, she punched in a quick message and hit send. She watched anxiously as Kieffer jumped a little in his seat as her message vibrated through his right leg a couple seconds later.

  Slowly reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his phone, struggling to read the letters on the lighted screen.

  R U OK? Pls respond.

  Ashley tried not to stare, but the need to figure out what went wrong the other night at dinner was driving her crazy. Watching him sit there staring at the tiny screen in his hands and not typing back only intensified that. She felt a mental fatigue that wasn’t part of her usual emotional makeup. Against her better judgement, she had fallen head over heels for Kieffer. And worst of all, she now suspected the feeling might not be mutual.

  With tiny white hands clenched around her new sparkle-coated Nokia, Ashley sat waiting for a response. When she felt that nagging buzz from her phone, her hands shook so badly that she almost let the plastic paperweight tumble to the floor. Tightening her grip, she read the message and felt her stomach sink down to her legs.

  fine. Need 2 tlk. Lunch?

  Dread so thick that for a second it halted the breath in her lungs rushed through Ashley’s body. Her suspicions had been right. He wasn’t interested in her at all and was probably freaked out by all her “forward” advances over the last week.

  How could you be so stupid?

  She grilled herself internally, feeling more and more of the sharp pains and barbs of abandonment pushing out against her cold skin with every new thought.

  He is a friend. Nothing more.

  The deep well of sadness that only heartbreak could dig was slowly swallowing her alive; plunging her down into the sulfuric depths of lethargic despair.

  Laying the phone on her desk, Ashley sat staring vacantly at the front of the room. For the second time in her life she allowed herself to be compromised. She had done so well in the past to avoid any real kind of relationship, always careful to distance herself when things got too casual with someone she liked. It was important for her to never get too close to anyone, even if everything inside told her to. A psychiatrist would probably tell Ashley that this act of emotional dissociation was due to trauma caused by the sudden absence of her father. They might be right in a sense, but really, things were much more complicated than that.

  Ashley, like Kieffer, was different.

  Although slightly more confident, Ashley was just as socially inept, often making the people around her uncomfortable without even trying. Granted, she handled it better than Kieffer, but it was obvious all the same. Where Kieffer usually avoided any and all confrontation, Ashley welcomed it. She thrived on the adrenaline of pushing another person to the limits of uncivil conversation. She learned from a very early age that words were magical. They possessed the power to inflict instant psychological damage and not much else. For Ashley, besting someone in their own argument was the next best thing to scoring the winning touchdown in the last quarter of the state finals.

  Like her mother, Ashley had a sharp tongue and a dark mind when pushed hard enough from the outside. Most of these past arguments didn’t end in punches, but some did. Her school days before moving to Hampden were tense to say the least. Back then she didn’t have Kieffer to relate to, so all her time was spent being angry at the people around her. Hating them for their shallow need to gossip and lie. Through those years she learned the fine art of social dominance and made a game out of it. But, getting someone to talk themselves into a corner or accidentally admitting that they love to eat shit wasn’t foolproof. The power really depended on the person hearing. Otherwise, they were just harmless words.

  Stupid sounds mostly made by stupid people with only stupid shit to say.

  No one knew that better than Ashley. Or so she thought. Here she was, falling into her own trap. Like a dumb sow, she let Kieffer mentally lasso her with soothing words of delayed rejection. All his weird behavior as of late would support that. The sudden exits, the spacey, blank look he got sometimes for no reason; it was all starting to make sense to her. He wasn’t interested and was either too afraid or too polite to tell her. And if it wasn’t that, then she had no idea. There were so many vague questions and so few logical answers.

  She thought quite childishly that Kieffer and she were soul mates. Like two halves of the same pie. Not just any pie, though. A pie full of rotten apples and spoiled tartar sauce that must have originated from the same pan. What are the odds that the other half might’ve belonged to another pie? Not likely, but who knows? Ashley had felt physical attraction towards other people, but never spiritual. That hypnotic feeling of knowing a stranger, as if you must have met each other in a different life, a different world, was never there before. Kieffer was the very first to blossom that feeling. He was genuine and smart; a real, living, unshielded person with no social masks or secondary faces. For no reason other than that, she had complete trust in him. A feeling once thought to be dead to those children whose fathers have run out on them.

  Those new feelings of warm, insulating love were gone, now replaced with hot stabs of hate. Red, burning coals of hurtful mistrust sizzled against her wiry muscles. The growing fire inside threatened to consume every rational feeling left in her heart.

  Eyes wide and thoughts scattered, Ashley sat straight up in her desk and stared emptily at the front of the room.

  Just then, it happened.

  The Change.

  She was no longer that innocent little girl with the cute face and dirty mouth. That Ashley was dead. Sharon, having gone through The Change herself, would have recognized it immediately. And if Sharon was in that classroom, she would’ve told Ashley what her mother had said to her at sixteen:

  “A fresh-eyed girl can’t never tell when love is wrong or right; just as an old, lonely woman can never forget when anger took her sight.”

  ***

  At that same moment roughly three miles away, Wayne King sat quietly on the frosted wooden bench-seat of the gazebo in his backyard. Soft clouds of breath fogged by the cold air around him shrouded his face. The tall pointed roof of the wall-less structure shielded him from only the warm rays of morning sunshine. Arctic whispers of chilled air blew through the frame’s wideset pillars, numbing his bald cheeks. He sat, hands limp at his sides, staring vacantly out into the thick shaded trim of woods that lined the north side property. His vacant, unblinking stare fixed to nothing at all. Even so, hi
s eyes appeared hard and narrowed; his posture perfectly still against the gentle push and pull of the bitter winds crossing through the naked trees.

  Completely motionless, he watched. He waited.

  It would only be a matter of time now. He sensed its arrival.

  The invading force in his mind allowed his rational, more human thoughts to wander as his body remained perfectly still. Perfectly ready. Rapidly losing ground, the Rational pondered from its shrinking corner, “What the hell’s happened to me since Saturday night???” He remembered waking up, heart racing and skin crawling with goosebumps, but couldn’t remember the dream that preceded it. He only remembered the feeling of an unseen mass of consciousness, millions and millions of miles long, collapsing into his own.

  Unbeknownst to Wayne, the dream transmission that woke him that night still lingered in every thought and breath that he took. Audible vapor trails, like relayed messages caught between his brain and the Earth’s reflective orbit, bounced in and out of his head at random. He had spent the last two days walking around the house in an almost drunken stupor, aimlessly looking for things that were never his. He felt possessed, his body and mind not feeling quite like his own.

  Waking up from dreamless sleep that morning, Wayne knew without thinking that the time had come. Calling in sick for the first time in two years, he cancelled his seminar appearance in Augusta for the afternoon. But, didn’t tell Sharon. Instead, he casually got up, took a shower, and went through his usual Monday morning routine with no one the wiser. Promptly at 8:00 a.m. like always, Sharon told Wayne to have a good day, kissed him on his freshly shaved cheek, and left to bring Ashley to school on her way to work. After hearing the car idle outside the walls for a bit before tooling away, Wayne got up from the kitchen table, found his winter jacket and gloves, and headed out to the gazebo. He heard the frozen blades of grass shatter under his feet as they carried him across the back lawn. But, didn’t feel its reluctance at all. He was merely a passenger at this point. An imprisoned rider trapped inside a giant's head; his two empty eyes acting as bay windows to the outside world.

  Sitting numbly on the wooden seat, ignorant to the chips of ice melting through the fabric of his nicest pair of slacks, Wayne's breath stopped. The human part of him that took seed in the ashy dirt inside his head was suffocating. Against all odds, it had grown through filth and decay to reach the warm glow of love on the other side. Sharon, once the mothering sun to these dark soils, was now eclipsed. Petals curling away from the radioactivity being laser-beamed into Wayne's head, the lonely flower wilts. Only one thing could live in that neurological dustbowl. Wayne knew, deep down, in his heart of hearts, what this all meant:

  THEY had found him.

  Somehow, someway, They had found another method of communication. Once the first connection had broken, They must have invented a different one. Twenty years later, They are back. A new way to extend beyond the brain damage and re-establish control. To this day, Wayne still couldn't believe that the cause of the accidental connection could also be the disconnector.

  By his twenty-year mark as The Doll Man, he was a burnt-out shadow of his former self. The Harvester was starting to unravel, not to mention getting a little sloppy on the job. The constantly invading voices and ever-flowing bottles of whiskey took their toll on him, making it almost impossible to interpret Their thoughts from his own. Over two decades without a single private moment or unchallenged decision brought on a serious case of hyper-psychosis. Wayne was a paper doll in Their hands. A little rip here, a tear there. It made no difference to Them. He learned early on that it was easier to submit to the unseen callers than to fight back. Drowning the voices in drink numbed his senses—not his thoughts. The liquor could only go down, not up. Glug-glug, chug-ah-lug. This forceful separation of self made Wayne feel at times as if he was a vacant body, absent of any depth or soul. Just rubber skin sewn over leaky plumbing. An empty vessel for Them to travel between realities.

  At one time, early on, Wayne was convinced that he was chosen by a higher power. Though that power seemed to be evil, he felt a small bit of comfort in knowing that he was protected. They would keep him safe. They needed him, his “talents.” Without him, what would They have? Nada goddamn thing.

  Wayne had become careless about covering up his tracks. He felt above any law or jury. These missteps ironically led him to being accidently exorcised of those entities. The demons were gone. Against all odds, he was cured. Crazy coincidences aside, at that point of his conscious reclamation, he knew he had someone much more powerful than Them watching over him. Wayne was given a second chance. He was reborn. Someone—or something—more powerful was out there. If Wayne didn’t know any better, he could’ve swore that God had been watching this whole time, waiting for the most opportune moment to step in.

  And not a second too late.

  Despite all his sin, Wayne was rewarded. And with this new lease on life he knew he would never be caught. Not by the police, not by his family—and especially, not by Them.

  Or, so he thought.

  Not since the sacrifice that got away had he heard that alien choir of synthesized voices. The same voices that had once turned him into a bounty hunter of souls. It wasn’t his mind playing tricks on him this time. He prayed like hell that it was. Wayne knew the sinking feeling in his head well. He was, for a second time, being booted from the cockpit.

  The strings tighten, and soon, the marionette is resurrected. Dancing to fingertips unseen, its painted eyes and chipped smile stand eternal.

  The lonely puppet cannot see past the stage.

  No matter, just dance, says a voice from behind the curtain.

  A pair of giant hands come down from the night to fix a broken string.

  THE TIME OF ASSIMILATION IS NOW.

  The passage itself was new to Wayne, but its meaning wasn’t.

  They required more plasmid.

  They were hungry.

  Still sitting in perfect silence, Wayne was glad that They weren’t talking right now, but he knew that would change. They would be back. The constant feeling of cold astral fingers wriggling through the flaps of his brain—organizing the new facts and information on an exterior database for further reference—made his nerves shiver under his hardened outer-shell.

  Powerless to block their efforts, he sat.

  He sat and he waited for that familiar sound. The one that would signal a means of temporary relief.

  Just as Wayne was about to mechanically raise his arm to check his wristwatch, he heard it:

  CHUCHINKchuchinkchink

  The hard metal on metal crash echoed briefly, causing some stirring in the thin bushes nearby. Once hidden birds took to the sky as Wayne rose stiffly from his bench and made his way down the short stairs and out towards the woods.

  His shuffled steps scraped and dug at the thawing leaves and mud on the foot-beaten trail. Most of his muscle memory was being used to occupy a dominant spot in his own head. If he didn’t mentally claim it now, then They would fill the entire space. Wayne knew that’s what would happen, whether he fought it or not. They would seize complete control. Regardless, he had to prepare himself for when full contact was made.

  About a hundred yards past the tree line, Wayne stopped and knelt, both knees popping off in unison like Chinese firecrackers. At his feet was a small metal cage with an orange tabby cat circling anxiously inside. It meowed and hissed up at Wayne, as if it knew that he was the one who laid the trap.

  Carefully, Wayne grabbed the top handle and gently carried the cage back towards the house. The cat, now shifting all its weight as far away from Wayne as possible, hissed and batted its claws against the metal grating. Hair spiked and fangs flashing in cloudless sunshine, the cat groaned in apprehension as Wayne crossed the back lawn and opened the side door to the garage, letting it bang back into its frame once inside.

  Using its nocturnal sight the cat looked around the dark and unfamiliar space, instinctually noting no obvious means of esc
ape. Its nebula diamond eyes found nothing of distinction in the musty room to aid its survival. Only a familiar rank smell continued to perk the cat’s senses. This place is danger, it thought.

  Suddenly, the room turned a blinding white as the overhead lights blinked on, exposing the empty slab of concrete floor. Tools and gadgets lined the walls, dark stains patched the outer rim of the room.

  Staring straight ahead, the cat could see a long wooden bench occupying one end of the back wall.

  In several steps they are there, and the cage is being hoisted onto the bench.

  Directly next to the cage, already open, is a large set of table-mounted vice clamps.

  The cat noticed the dull blue claw hanging off the edge of the long table, but not really. It noticed them as much as a spider might notice its own reflection. All implications to their use was inconceivable.

  It simply is, until it’s not.

  At that moment, the set of heavy metal clamps wasn’t a threat to the cat—not yet, anyway. Its limited capacity for complex thinking was being spent on figuring out how to free itself of the cage. In its panicked state, the cat failed to notice Wayne take off his jacket and gloves. He watched the cat curiously as he rolled up the gold-stitched sleeves of his dress shirt. Jacket replaced by a long dark-stained smock, he took down a pair of safety goggles from the corkboard in front of him. He then picked up a set of thick leather gloves from the workbench and slipped them on over his bare forearms.

  By the time the cat began to comprehend what was happening, Wayne's hands were already inside the cage.