Kain knew it was too late. They all did.
Ben Caldwell came barreling up the drive, a swirling tornado of dust behind him. He hadn’t slowed, had, in fact, sped up. He didn’t see the dog coming. He was too busy listening to some Buddy Holly song blaring from his radio, too busy thinking about girls and baseball and the great tits on this screaming thirty-eight-year-old he had lost his virginity to on Friday night, too busy dying to tell his best friend Ryan all about it … not at all thinking about how he was going much too fast, not at all about that streaking mass of dark brown fur darting out in front of him like a ghost.
The truck struck Beakers dead-on, crushing his skull and his frame instantly. There was a solid thunk that seemed to hover in the heat like a long scream. His head exploded in blood, his eyes popping from their sockets like tiny balls shot from a toy gun. His body collapsed as it fell under the vehicle, the pickup rocking as it rolled over him. The driver, suddenly aware of what had happened, braked hard. The truck slid into a fishtail, dragging the dog in the dirt. Its coat was bloodied and torn, its fat tongue hanging from its limp jaws like a dead snake. Beaks was still breathing—barely, if that were possible—and then he wasn’t.
Lynn Bishop nearly screamed again, managing but a pitiful squeal that died before it became a real sound. Lee-Anne fell into a silent sob, covering her mouth with both hands. Her body began to tremble, and she had to lean against her mother for support. Tears streamed down her cheeks like rivers of gold. Lynn’s too. Ryan Bishop stood frozen, his helpless lips trying to say something but saying nothing, and Ben Caldwell, his eyes big balls of horror behind the wheel, dropped his head and held it in his hands. Buddy Holly went on singing “Heartbeat,” and in the next beat of his own heart, the drifter with the long hair and the birthmarks that weren’t really birthmarks, brought the tips of two fingers to his right temple.
~ 12
To be sure, he heard the old man, those damning words as stabbing as the sobs around him—It’s not our place, it’s not our world—but as quickly as the mantra had come, Kain Richards pushed it away, into a dark recess of his mind. Still, the voice would return, as he knew it would. Come to haunt him in his dreams. In his days. It always did.
He trembled at that sudden spark in his heart. Trembled still, after all these years. He stared unshakably at the dead dog, his dark eyes fixed as if hardened glass. A vein throbbed above his brow like some thick worm crawling inside of him. That familiar tingle teased as the hair on his flesh began to rise, his temperature leaping in great bounds. It was coming, coming strong, and he readied himself for the rush. The primal energies he summoned began to flow through him and into his extremities, a trickle one moment, a burst floodgate the next, and then, as his chest tightened and his muscles grew taut, his mind took control, of the fluid forces of Time.
The boy noticed it first, the electricity, at the rising hairs on his arms. The fine strands of the women’s hair flittered up and up, enough to make them stare at each other in incredulity. The air began to compress about them, as if invisible walls were closing in. Odd clicking sounds held at the very cusp of hearing, not entirely unlike chattering teeth, but not quite. It was difficult to say exactly what it sounded like (some might say a buzz or a hum), but it was disturbing enough that Lynn Bishop cocked her head for a better sample. She shook it off as if she had not really heard it, or as if she had, and had simply refused to believe it.
It was the girl who asked about the smell, if anyone smelled that. Her voice had altered in pitch, had slowed to a slur. Lynn replied, but the word came distorted, stretched and twisted into a meaningless rabble between Yes and Yoooosh. Ryan sniffed deeply and instantly grimaced, although instantly took four or five seconds. The air reeked of burning matches. It stung their eyes and burned their lungs, and if they could have seen him, they would have realized that Ben Caldwell had not been spared its wrath. Rubbing did no good, made it worse, and when Lee tried to clear her eyes on her shirtsleeve, she had to stop and draw a hand to her midsection, as if suddenly struck with nausea. She doubled, and her mother steadied her.
The temperature, like the mounting pressure, spiked and kept on rising. Someone shouted something about it, yet who was impossible to know. The voice was no longer human, akin to a bad recording played at extremely slow speed, and what was said was so much garble that no one could have known what was said. Everything was slowing down, as if the world had grown brakes and was applying them hard.
Like a predator, that charging current grew claws and held whatever held a heartbeat in place. Ryan tried to move, but found the air a frightening thing; a definitive boundary of invisible energy imprisoned them. He put up a hand to feel his way, but drew it back quickly (as quickly as one could in such shackling slow motion), as if something had snapped at it. He regrouped, and this time, he did move through it, though sluggishly, like a deep sea explorer walking on the ocean floor. Watching in disbelief, clearly sensing this thickening field, Lynn Bishop cowered as she drew her daughter close.
Seconds had passed, but it seemed like minutes. One could believe that, perhaps, the Earth had stopped turning. The universe. Buddy Holly was still singing, the Crickets backing him, but his voice had collapsed like the others, the music itself a guttural din of guitar and drum that bore no semblance to either instrument. The song grew longer and thicker, ever more languid with each passing beat.
And then the mist appeared.
A purplish haze hovered about the drifter’s boots. Egg-shaped and thick, it was impenetrable to the eye. Ryan Bishop saw it, and with a movement as labored as a crippled man, motioned to it with a stabbing finger. Lynn Bishop turned from her son and back toward Kain, her effort lasting an age, her eyes falling to the mysterious fog. Her mouth eventually slid open, and in a gut reaction driven purely by fear, she clutched her daughter ever dearer.
The soaring heat suffocated; it left them gasping. That stench of burning phosphorous had grown overpowering, and the encompassing pressure had become so intense that Ryan had raised his hands to his ears to stem the painful popping in them. As disoriented as a drunk, he staggered at the edge of the steps, nearly tumbling down and into the yard. Lynn and her daughter were on the brink of collapse. Grasses and wildflowers, like the flowers in the planters, began to wither and wilt. Only the hardiest held on, but it would not be long before they too succumbed to the dead heat.
A fine powder, white as talcum and of nearly the same texture, began to settle on their hair and their clothes. It got in their eyes. It appeared as if by magic, the current drawing matter from outside the boundary—perhaps beyond normal, three-dimensional space—channeling it inside the bubble of energy. It seemed to emanate from no single radiant, but from everywhere, whirling about, as if a sandstorm had suddenly erupted. And yet, the maelstrom was soundless; it was like watching a rainstorm on television with the volume turned down. It clung to everything in its path, grass and flower, flesh and hair, nothing immune to its grasp. Lynn and her son choked on it, and her daughter had to bury her head in her mother’s chest to stem its relentless attack.
Buddy Holly died in an instant. That is to say, Ben Caldwell’s truck died, as the electrical system suddenly failed. The engine sputtered and stalled. Powder painted the windshield, painted the hood and the bed, and swept in through the side windows in a thickening cloud. The shortstop raised his head in that immutable slowness, his shock so total he looked as if he’d wet himself.
Three cats emerged from under the veranda, the blacks and the tabby stepping so slowly they could have been mistaken for stuffed kills. They turned toward the farmhouse, their eyes bulging and bloodshot and yellowed as butter. Their coats were slick and wet and matted, as if someone had dunked them in a tub of water. Trembling on their skinny legs, their simple animal minds were lost; they stared blankly into space as if insane. Powder began to settle on them, quickly swallowing their fragile bodies. The dead shepherd suffered the same ills, its dark fur whitening, that inexplicable wetness now a viscous
mix of powder and blood.
An even stranger fate befell the tabby. It started to rise—to float—and simply hovered there, six inches above the ground. Clearly distraught, it clawed at the grass trying to snag it. The other cats, they too, defying gravity, swept at the ground in similar slow motion. Incredulous, Lynn turned to her son, with all the swiftness of old age. She motioned to him, trying to alert him of this new madness, only to discover that he’d already found it; the boy was completely agog.
Despite the brilliant sun of midday, there were no shadows beneath the critters; none below the vehicles or the veranda or the now-dying oak. Somehow, they had been swallowed by some invisible black maw, leaving only light, and when Lynn Bishop eventually passed a hand above her daughter’s crown and cast no shadow, all she could do was turn in disbelief, it too an eternity in its labor, to finally face the man behind her.
Time, once seemingly absolute, stopped. It was as if God had waved His hand and had forbid the future from coming. Kain’s eyes were black diamonds, as burning as fire. His body rocked, his flesh painfully hot, the throb in his brain a growing tumor of spikes. About him, all breath ceased, and all sound—outside the ear, inside the mind—died. A crippling stillness took hold, an eerie silence where even thought went unheard. The three, Lynn and Ryan and Lee, were dead in time, grotesque mannequins whose faces had been molded in terror. Their skin and their clothes were damp, the powder clinging to them. Inside his pickup, the young shortstop sat perfectly still, his twisted expression locked in permanent astonishment. The cats, as if frightened to a fit by a sudden din, were a prize-winning photograph caught by a photographer at precisely the moment they had leapt into the air. A crow, perhaps the same he had met on his first day here, hung still against an azure sky, its wings spread in flight. In the distance, beyond the range of the electric bubble, a stand of Scotch pine planted as windbreaks swayed in a sudden gust of soundless wind. A pair of Canada geese soared silently and with ease. Far along the country road, out of sound but not of sight, a convertible passed Al Hembruff’s lumbering flatbed, and as Kain Richards watched them carry on in their Time, untouched by the magic, how he wished he had not Turned, had not cast Lynn Bishop and her children into this hellish maelstrom … and took no solace that in another moment, it would all be over.
The energy, the life force of the Turn, ravaged his body. The peak was coming, the time around him falling out of phase with the now. The girl closed her eyes; more accurately, they melted shut, as time, their time, began to decay … began its unfocused reverse. As if she had been flipped upside down, tears slid slowly up her cheeks. Her lips moved strangely, muttering silent backwards gibberish, and her skin and hair became this ugly goo he could never get used to. Her head, already a gummy mass, fell back to her mother’s bosom and became one with Lynn’s faltering frame. Lynn’s face was a fluid, slick blob, but her eyes, god, her eyes, told a story of terror. No more than roiling globes, they were still able, still seeing. She knew, as her melting children knew, what was happening: they did not understand it, could not know exactly what was occurring, but they were aware, cognizant of their bodies and minds sliding from solid to slime. From something living to something not.
In his next breath they were gone, as everything inside the energy field—everything but him—slipped inside itself. Their tiny world fell to blackness, this side of Now, an existence not in normal time, but a Now completely disparate, collapsing to a single point of what Kain Richards had come to think of as nothingness. It wasn’t nothingness, of course, it was everything and the sink, it was Lynn and her children and her floating cats, it was Ben Caldwell and his powdered pickup, it was a crow and it was flowers, it was a dead pet named Beakers—but thinking it so had sometimes, not often, not nearly enough, helped him cope with his crime.
Alone now, so alone, he faltered in the darkness. The blackness he stood in—drifted in, more aptly, for he held no ground, there was no ground—devoured him. He screamed at the horror of it, yet heard nothing; his hearing, like his voice, was as impotent as his shell of a body. He possessed but a fleeting awareness of his own existence, drowning as he was in the limitless warps and curves of timelessness. He had Mind, Mind, and more Mind.
The dark backward and abysm of Time.
He dared not look; he had shut his eyes tight at the instant of implosion. There were things out there, memories out there in the abyss, all things good and all things not, life and death and misery. He had looked once as a child, just once, and he would not look again.
Still, in his mind’s eye he saw it, hovering in that heartless void. He focused and channeled his will, then reached out and grabbed hold of Time’s Wheel. Sure in grasp, solid as stone, he drew it back … back … back … enduring agony beyond the agony. His blood boiled, and his soul, a thing he had once believed was nothingness, stepped outside of him.
That great charge came again, one final, explosive rush. He was Time, he was Mind, and in the next moment, spent, let slip his grasp. He slipped away, swept up in the current of that endless black sea, but like the birth of all things, from darkness came light, brilliant and blinding, and the world turned to what was … what had been.
~ 13
“Ma? What’s going on?”
The pretty teen had reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes big white coins.
“Any ideas, Lynn?” Kain was not about to make the same mistake twice. He had considered bolting for the back door in the hope that the dog might charge after him—hand the shortstop some precious seconds to stop—and had decided standing pat a better play. Better to keep old Beaks growling at him in a standoff than to have him tear outside in a panic. Again.
“None,” Lynn said. “But enough is enough.”
She was clearly frightened, but of the dog’s outburst or of what had just transpired, he could not be sure. He was still reeling from all the static. From the Turn. But what concerned him at this particular moment was Lynn herself. If she did have the Sense, well, wouldn’t he have a lot of explaining to do.
“What happened to Beaks, Ma? What happened to him?”
The shepherd’s eyes were the color of aged butter, carved in bloodshot. As if they had been exposed to some caustic chemical.
“I don’t know,” Lynn said sharply, and she directed her son. “Come get him.”
Ryan Bishop stepped back into the house and let the screen door close behind him. He limped slightly as he moved down the hallway. He had to stop a moment to rub his leg.
“What’s wrong?” Lynn asked.
“I think I pulled something. No big deal.”
The boy took the dog by the collar and had to drag it along the hardwood. Ryan was clearly favoring his left leg, wincing under the strain. The shepherd put up a solid fight and was still growling when he finally drew it outside.
“Ma—”
“Not now, Lee.” She turned to Kain. “Are you o—”
Kain passed her without a word and held at the door. The boy and the shepherd were at the top step. In the distance, there was no sign of the convertible or Big Al’s flatbed. They had long since passed in their own time.
He looked down at the deck, at the spot where he had been standing when the dog had been killed. Where he had Turned. Damn.
“Kain?”
He ignored Lynn’s call. “Hold him,” he said to Ryan. Beakers snarled and flew into a barking fit. “Hold him.”
The boy wrestled with the big animal. He seemed quite put off as he knelt and slung an arm around him. He looked up with bold eyes. Slightly bloodshot, a tad this side of saffron, they cast a burning glare that said, Stop messing with my dog, mister … stop messing with us.
The pickup slid to a quick stop, a wall of dust spewed up behind. The driver got out. Dressed in jeans and a faded yellow T-shirt, topped with a wrinkled Yankees cap, Ben Caldwell started for the veranda calling out for Beaks. The dog kept on in a frenzy.
“Kain?”
“Ma.”
“I said not now, Le
e.”
Kain knew what the girl was on about. It would be but a moment before Lynn or Ryan would be on about it as well.
“Is everything all right?” Lynn said, wavering.
“I was worried about your dog. I heard the truck coming up fast.”
She looked out and saw the driver making his way to the steps. Ben Caldwell was walking strangely, lumbering as if his legs were made of rubber. “Yes … he does drive too fast,” she said, making sure the boy could hear.
“Sorry, Mrs. Bishop.”
“There’s no reason to come charging in here like that. One of these days you’re going to be sorry you did.”
Ben Caldwell lowered the brim on his cap. Kind of kicked at the dirt a little.
“You okay, bud?” Ryan said.
“I think my legs fell asleep.” Benny was rubbing them now. He motioned to the growling dog. “What’s with him? And what’s with his eyes?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said flatly, and his eyes met hard with the drifter’s.
The shortstop recognized the face behind the screen door, and just as he was about to say, Hey, it’s the Little Ghost, he was interrupted.
“Let’s go, Ben.”
Ryan limped as he led the dog into the yard. Beaks settled with distance, but the dog wobbled in its stride, as if the muscles in its legs had stiffened; suddenly, it seemed a hundred years old in human years. Ben Caldwell followed, he too, hobbling like a man old before his time, and between complaining about his aching muscles and the god-awful heat, as he called it, suggested they take the dog with them into town. Ryan agreed, and the boys helped the aging shepherd into the back of the truck. Ryan cast the drifter a narrowed glance before he got in, and before Kain could step out and apologize for upsetting the dog, the pickup sped off as quickly as it had come.
“Oh, that Ben Caldwell,” Lynn said.
Kain stole another glance at the deck before heading back to the kitchen. Lynn joined him and sat across from him. Lee-Anne stood near the stairs. Kain regarded the girl for but an instant. He was in deep. Way too deep.
Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller Page 10
