“I’m so sorry, Kain.” She stroked his hand. “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“Did your grandmother know about the Turn? Do your parents know?”
“No.” He paused. “No.”
She started to ask, but again, he knew.
“Yes,” he said. “You have the Sense.”
~
“But how?” she asked. “I mean, why me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He dimmed. “But not a day goes by I don’t ask myself that very thing.”
“You really hate it … don’t you.”
He added some thin dead branches to the crackling fire. The soft orange light betrayed his solemn expression.
“When I was reading,” she said, “I tried to imagine what it was like for you. But I guess I can’t.”
“No.”
“And Ryan? Him too?”
“And Ben Caldwell. But not Lee.”
“And my parents?”
He shook his head.
“What do you call them? Stiffs?”
“I wouldn’t call them that.”
She hesitated. “And Ray?”
“A Stiff,” he said. “Probably the most closed-minded man I’ve ever come across.”
She gave him this curious glance.
“What …”
“I was just wondering,” she said. “What you feel when you’re around someone like me.”
He started to speak, but stopped. He hadn’t even realized it until now.
Nothing. He sensed nothing.
No static … no mindless rabble of a thousand crossed stations. In the old days, when his wiring had been shiny and new, it was like Gramps had said, like that odd tingly feeling when someone was behind you, only a whole lot stronger. But now—
Ryan. He had been with him earlier, and now that he thought about it, couldn’t recall feeling anything with him as well.
Whatever the cause—the drugs, the black work of the Turn, the beating he took from Ryan—probably all of them conspiring together—right now, he was flying blind.
“Kain?”
“Nothing,” he told her. “Not anymore.”
~
He told her how his ability to detect the Sense had been failing. How it had gone from a clear signal (the radio station analogy seemed the only way to explain it), to the grueling static of scores of overlapping stations … and finally to dead air. And then he told her how he and Ryan had, two weeks prior, nearly come to blows.
“I blacked out.”
“What?” And then she realized. “Just like July 4. When Ray was there. You could barely stand. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There’s more,” he said. “Something worse.”
He told her how time had hiccupped.
“I remember,” she said, upon reflection. “At the time, I thought I was crazy.”
“I didn’t Turn.”
“But I thought—”
“It just happened,” he said. “It was like my mind just lost control.”
“It happened by itself?”
He nodded gravely.
“Has it happened since?”
“No. Thank God.”
“Any more blackouts?”
“Just dizzy spells.”
Lynn never had the chance to ask.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I can still Turn.”
~
He could try, he said, but she would have none of it. For all they knew, another Turn could kill him.
They sat silently watching the fire.
“It’s getting late,” he said. “Maybe we should—”
She kissed him. She kissed him under the stars, and like the firmament, it lasted; it swept him away.
There would only be one first time.
~ 23
She asked how it all began; how it was such a—miracle, was the word she used, struggling to find one—had come to pass. Like his grandfather before him, he held no explanation. Gramps had it, as did his grandfather, and as far as Gramps had known, it had been passed down for generations, most usually in the second, although there may have been wider gaps, perhaps lesser ones, perhaps the direct passing from father to son. There were no women, and never were, at least to their knowledge, in possession of it, but absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. There had been tales, Gramps had told him, that men of old Europe, men of power and men of not, had burned their ancestors at the stake, had them quartered, stoned, or beheaded. Were they warlocks? Devils? Demons? No one really knew the source of the Turn. Like the Earth and the stars, like time itself, it had always existed … it just seemed to be.
“And the others—” Her voice trailed off.
He knew of only two: the farmer from Melbourne, and the boy.
“Dead,” he said, and that was all.
~
“Maybe there are others,” she said. “I mean, if they had children, or brothers—”
She stopped. Even she knew.
“Brikker,” she said, and the way she said it sounded as if she had just tasted poison.
“He would have found them by now,” he said. “Believe it.”
Her gaze slipped. “He won’t stop looking. Will he.”
He said nothing.
~
“I was in Newark,” he said, when she asked how they found him. “January 3, 1952.”
They—the G-men, one of them a pitiless brute named Strong—waited in the back alley, behind the diner where he was working the night shift as a short-order cook. There were six of them and only one of him, five to hold him, one to serve the injection. When he came to two months later, doped and barely able to speak, he was strapped in a wheelchair in some dark, cavernous hellhole in the Nevada desert.
“The Crypt,” she said, softly.
He told her everything. The experiments and the drugs. The torture and the darkness.
The madness.
By the end, she was in tears.
“How long?” she asked, nearly unable to.
~
Strong had come. He had been in an unusually casual mood, cracking jokes, making small talk. Kain had smelled the whiskey on him, and when the man had, so unlike him, missed a clasp on one of the restraints on the chair, he had simply waited for his chance.
Shortly after the grunt had worked him over, Brikker had emerged from the shadows. The demon had stood over him, silent and cold, the tease of tobacco lingering in the air. And just as he was about to inject him, Kain had pulled his right hand free and had snatched the syringe. It was the one time he had heard the man scream. A needle to the eye will do that.
“He wears a patch now,” he said, matter-of-factly.
They chased him. The place was immense, far larger than he could have imagined, a numbing maze of dark corridors of stone and steel that turned and circled, circled and turned, like an unsolvable riddle. He could still hear the crisp echo of their footsteps closing on him.
“I should have killed him,” he said.
It had been New Year’s Eve, 1955.
~
“Four years,” Lynn said. “My God.”
After his escape, the desert had nearly consumed him.
“I wanted to die there,” he said. “There was nothing left of our family. Nothing left of Kain Richards.”
Lynn started to say something, but instead she hesitated. She reached into her pocket, and then, still unsure, handed him the folded newspaper clipping she had found in his diary.
“Tell me,” she said. “If you can.”
~
The Newark Star-Ledger, March 4, 1951
LOCAL RESIDENT KILLED
Freak Storm Claims Newark Woman
The winter storm had risen quickly, sleet and snow raging in from the Atlantic, the way it often did, without warning. His mother, a casual driver at best, could only scream as she hit the top of the bridge and lost control. The car had plummeted twenty-five feet, and while the police had tried to reassure she
had died instantly on striking the ice, only God knew: she had survived the crash. Angela Richards had suffered two broken legs and a broken back, had simply screamed and screamed as her car slipped silently through the ice. She had been alive for nearly twenty minutes.
~
“It was a Tuesday when the rains came,” he said. He said it somberly, and stopped there. He tried to push them from his mind, as fast and as far as he could, only to fail; when he closed his eyes, he could see them ever clearer in that living room window. Could hear them whisper. Only when he felt the gentle stroke of Lynn’s hand on his could he start again.
“It was one of those long, gray days, when the drizzle never stops,” he said. “Like it’ll rain forever. It was the morning after the funeral. My father was alone in the living room. No. Not the old apartment. They’d moved a few years before. Nice place on the outskirts. White picket fence. Fireplace. Big bright windows all around. You would have liked it.
“He’d been up all night. I don’t think he’d slept in a week. He looked … he looked cold. He was holding a photograph. Yes. The one in my diary. He just sat there, staring at it. I sat down across from him. It must have been an hour before he even noticed me.
“He finally looked up. His eyes were stone. It was like he didn’t know me. Not at first. He tried so hard to force a smile. He handed me the picture. It was his favorite. He was always so proud of it. Said it was the best one he’d ever taken. He wanted me to have it.
“It was in a frame on the mantel, but he’d taken it out. It felt different, holding it like that. Maybe he thought it could bring them close, at least one last time. I remember running my finger over her face. I don’t think I knew I was doing it.
“I must have seen that picture a hundred times … you know how you’ve seen something so much you don’t even see it anymore? It was like that. I just saw my mother. But when I finally realized … when I saw my father’s tear on the print … it was too late.”
~
For nearly twelve hours he had sat in the leaden light of the window, consumed by that maddening drizzle; it was as if the world had stopped. As if all that lay between this life and the next was a great gray expanse of insanity. He had made a game of it, chasing the droplets of water as they raced silently down the glass. Now and again he would stop to glance at his side, at the limp and bloodied body there. He dozed once, perhaps twice, and when he finally stirred around midnight, rose to make some tea. Standing there in a daze stirring in some sugar, it struck him: how little he knew of the man. How funny it was. He didn’t even know that his father had a gun.
“He blamed himself,” Kain said. “He was on the road when Mom died. For years, I blamed him, too.”
He stoked the small campfire.
“It kept me alive,” he told her. “When they took me … all I could do was cling to the hope that someday I could find that picture. I don’t know why. I guess it was all I had left. When I finally worked my way back to Newark, I was so afraid. That maybe the house was sold. Even if it wasn’t, what were the odds it would still be inside? But it was. It was.”
He sniffled. He could still see his mother, broken and screaming, unable to even claw at the glass as the car slipped deeper into the cold of the river. Into the blackness. The nothingness.
“No one heard her,” he whispered, his voice on the verge of breaking. “No one heard her screams.”
“Kain …”
“I heard them. I still hear them.”
~
He sat ever so still. The screams eventually slipped away, drowning in the dreariness of the rains.
“Do you remember what the old man told me? About when I Turn?”
“He told you not to—” She stopped herself. “You didn’t. You did.”
He swallowed something cold and raw. “I saw her die.”
~
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How? I mean, when?”
“Do you remember your dream? The one where Ryan killed Mortimer?”
“Like it was yesterday.”
“It wasn’t really a dream, Lynn.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Mortimer.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying your memories were just messed up. What you dreamt … what you saw … it was Costello.”
“Costello? But … but that’s not—”
Lynn Bishop stopped herself. Something stirred in her mind. Something dark.
“I remember,” she said, the words barely there. “Oh my God, Kain. I remember.”
~
Gramps had a name for it: he called it the Coming.
“Are you saying … I saw the future?”
“It is possible,” he said, hesitantly. “But only a few with the Sense can. Very few. It rarely happens, of course. And even when it does, you may not realize it at the time—the mind can play a lot of tricks on you in a Turn, believe me. The thing is, the Coming could surface later, like any other memory.”
“Like in a dream.”
“Yes.”
“And you? You can do this, too? I mean, with your mother—you had a dream?”
He didn’t answer. But it was all over his face.
“You looked on purpose?” she said. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“I was young,” he said. “Young, and way too curious.”
“Ohhh, Kain.”
“Gramps thought I was afraid of the dark,” he said. “In a way, he was right. All you see is darkness.”
She held his hand.
“Night after night I kept having bad dreams. Horrible dreams. He’d come, and every time he’d stub his toe on the end of the bed. Just to make me laugh. He’d wrap his arm around me and tell me everything would be all right. I don’t think I’d ever been so scared. He’d go to the closet and pull it open. You know, to show me there was nothing there. I never told him what was wrong. I never told him I looked. I couldn’t.”
“But Kain … that was over twenty years before it happened. Is that even possible?”
“Time isn’t linear,” he told her, and he could see she did not understand. “A clock … it’s just something we use to keep track of it. Something the human mind can grasp. In reality, it can’t really be measured. It follows its own rules.”
“Time flies?”
“Exactly,” he said. “And sometimes it stands still.”
“Like when you’re waiting in line.”
“Yes. But it’s much more.” He spread his arms out. “Imagine your whole life is like a movie. Every frame laid out in front of you on this big wall. You can see it all at once, or zero in on a single frame. Like a photo album. You can flip back if you want. Or look forward.”
“But I thought—”
“No,” he said. “I can’t go forward. I said, ‘look’.”
“But your grandfather … he said the future hasn’t happened yet,” she said, sounding utterly confused. “You … me … we can really see it?”
“A version of it. A possible outcome. It doesn’t mean it’s carved in stone.”
“Beakers,” she said, after some consideration. “I guess it isn’t.”
“I should have warned her, Lynn. I should have, but I didn’t.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “You couldn’t have known it would happen. And what would you have said? She would have never believed a word.”
“I shouldn’t have listened to him,” he said, the mantra growing in his mind like a tumor.
It’s not our place … it’s not our world.
“That god damn bird,” he said.
“Kain … you have to stop this.”
“Why? Why do I have to?”
He had raised his voice; it had frightened her.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“The old man made me a secret,” he said. “He made me a ghost. And my mother died because of me.”
~ 24
For a moment, he slipped i
nto that black abyss of what was, the horror stirring in his mind. Even now, years later, the memories felt as real as the terrors from a nightmare. As close.
“I tried to go back,” he said. “Before the accident.”
“What? Can you do that? That far?”
He turned to her. Stumbled to find the words. “It was hell on Earth,” he confessed, saying it in that same devouring tone he had used when he had said it to her son. “Like The War of the Worlds or something.”
He went on.
“The Turn … it’s like ripples in a pond,” he said. “Drop a small stone, you get small ripples. If I go back, say, maybe thirty seconds or so—time reverses in a very small area around me. Maybe a few hundred feet.”
“Like a bubble.”
“Yes. Exactly. But everything outside that bubble keeps going as it was. Clocks. Watches. Everything. Now—if I drop a big stone—if I Turn way back—the ripples in the pond are much stronger. And last a lot longer.”
“And reach a lot farther,” she said. “My God, Kain.”
“I didn’t just take me back a week,” he said. “I took the entire city—and a wide area beyond it, with me.”
“How is that possible?”
“At first—” He hesitated, uncertain of how to proceed. “Everything seemed normal. It was the day of the accident. I had about two hours. Like I said, things seemed normal. But I knew pretty quickly that I’d Turned too far.”
“People on the outside knew. People outside the bubble.”
He nodded. “After a few days, it was all over the radio. In the papers. How the city of Newark had slipped back in time.”
“I remember that! We all thought it was some kind of joke. A publicity stunt. But after a while we knew that something had gone on there. Something wrong. It was awful.”
“Local papers were a week behind,” he said. “And the local radio stations.”
“Wait a minute, Kain …”
“The clipping,” he said. He held it up in the flickering firelight.
“That … that shouldn’t exist.”
“Normally it wouldn’t,” he told her. “It was in my pocket when I Turned.”
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