They simply weren’t perfect enough, and so she continued her search with a growing sense of desperation, one room at a time, until finally there was only one place left to check.
The old gymnasium was a separate building, about 40 yards behind the school. Inside, it was lightless and empty, like entering the vault of a great cave. Every step and every breath echoed in the vast, high-ceilinged space. It was much too dark within to see anything,, but this didn’t matter, because Simone soon became aware of a strange new way of sensing; as though invisible tendrils were extending outward from her body in all directions, sending back a knowledge of shapes, textures, and distances.
This new sense, she realized, must’ve been active for some time now—perhaps as much as several hours—existing just beneath the threshold of her conscious awareness, providing her with subtle hints about her surroundings. After all, the main school building had certainly been very dark as well, despite the windows and the brightness of the moon, but she’d never felt the least bit disoriented in there either.
Amazing, she thought, as she tried to comprehend the incredible sensation of standing in total darkness and still being fully aware of everything around her, in every direction.
She was momentarily dumbstruck by the discovery of this new power, and would have taken a few minutes to test its limits, but the strange instinctive compulsion to find a hiding place was overriding all other concerns. All she could do was accept that the ability existed, that it worked, and put it to practical use in her exploration of the dark space around her.
It didn’t take long to determine that the gym itself was far too open for her purposes, but that was okay, because the changing rooms, which were constructed under the bleachers, were dark and windowless, and surprisingly clean, with cool concrete floors that she knew would feel good on her skin when she lay down on them.
She chose the girl’s room because it was the one she remembered, and closed herself up in there, settling down in a corner opposite the door.
Almost as soon as she stretched out, her body simply shut down.
It wasn’t sleep, but something deeper, that claimed her. Almost like death.
- - -
The trip from the airport to Goldbrook took Malcolm more than an hour, traveling over roads that were dark and mostly empty.
In the silence, his mind drifted around the edges of his problem, always returning to the box, and what might be inside it, and what it might mean.
The goddess Vivienne—in all her many guises, was particularly known for one thing—her association with the so-called Keys of Heaven.
Despite the name, none of these were actually keys at all, rather they were special tools made by the gods, designed to manipulate The Stream of reality in ways that were almost beyond belief.
Excalibur was a very well known one that had particular associations with the legends of The Lady of the Lake, but there were others as well, most of them related to a few of her other identities.
And, much like Excalibur, most of them were massively terrifying once you understood what they were supposedly able to do; items like the Staff of Moses, for instance, and the Spear of Destiny; objects with powers so unbelievable that most sane people would probably pray that they couldn’t exist at all.
Was he carrying such an object right now? In his van?
And if so, what did that say about the young woman, Simone? Was this girl actually strong enough to wield one of the Keys of Heaven?
And even if she was, why would any reasonable person want to put something so powerful into her hands? What on earth could be the reason for trusting something that dangerous to a girl in her early 20s with no training, and virtually no relevant life experience?
His mind was boggled by the idea. It was utterly insane. It actually made him angry to think about it, and he couldn’t imagine a scenario where he would hand such a thing over to her, particularly considering the fact that she was most likely in the process of becoming a Darklord.
Why would anyone want to give one of the Keys of Heaven to a Darklord?
It’s bloody ridiculous.
He tried to stop thinking about it, focused his mind on more pressing matters, like the question of what he was going to do with her when he found her.
Vivienne had been pretty grim with her warning that the girl might be dangerous already, which wasn’t necessarily a shock.
She’d definitely been acting strangely during their magical meeting outside Joe’s place—confused, frightened, paranoid; all symptoms that could easily denote the early stages of transformation.
Even so, he didn’t intend to give up on her without a fight. There were several things he wanted to try, simple things that he thought might help her reclaim parts of her personality. But in order to do anything at all, he would need some degree of cooperation from her. She would have to trust him, at least a little, and she would have to control herself enough to keep from hurting him or hurting other people.
What would he do if she was crazed or murderous by the time he found her? What if she simply attacked him, tried to kill him?
What’s there to think about? a part of his mind said. If she’s already become a monster, you’ll have to shoot her, won’t you? Shoot her till her head explodes? Like what you did with old Joe?
An image of Joe’s corpse flashed into his mind, the top of the head gone, brains leaking out onto the concrete floor, facial features swollen outward from the pressure of the bullets passing through.
Bile rose up in his throat and he nearly gagged.
No. There has to be another way. Anything but that…
- - -
As her body quivered there in the corner of the little dressing room, Simone woke briefly when she felt THE MIND touch her for the first time, a sensation like being filled with cold water. The touch was soft—mercifully—like the caress of a lover, but still she was nearly crushed by it.
She wasn’t ready yet. Her body, her brain, hadn’t changed enough to accept THE MIND in the fullness of its power.
In that moment, she knew many things about THE MIND.
It was curious about her.
It was excited to finally be in touch with her.
It wanted to know her.
It wanted to be her new friend.
It was a dark thing, enormous and strange, and it lived in the mud, deep, deep down under the water.
At night THE MIND liked to pull its great body out of the sea and move around on land.
It liked to eat little human children.
It told her, without words, that she would bring children to it, very young ones, girls and boys, to satisfy this craving for the destruction of innocence, and that it would love her for helping it in this way.
When THE MIND withdrew, she lost consciousness for a little while again—like someone had just unplugged her from a wall socket.
She fell back into that black empty cloud of nothing, that deep hibernation, for a while, and when she woke again, her whole body itched terribly.
The itch tickled, almost pleasantly, and it burned (not so pleasant) and as she scratched she noticed that her skin had begun to feel different under her fingers: smooth, like touching plastic.
Her teeth were also changing. Not falling out and being replaced, but actually—by some process she couldn’t even imagine—reshaping themselves, getting sharper.
Whatever was happening to her was reaching a critical point, beyond which everything would begin to get easier.
She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she had no doubt it was true. It was like the knowledge had been written into her flesh and bones.
Just a little longer, she told herself.
Chapter 6 - The Stack
Malcolm crossed the Reed County line at about 11:20, and entered the main township of Goldbrook about 10 minutes later.
It was an old fashioned little town, nothing much going for it, probably not very prosperous—or populous. Just about everything in town was already clo
sed up for the night.
He parked his van in front of the local post office, a tiny single story building with a neat brick exterior and a gable roof that looked more like a one-bedroom house than an official government facility.
He took out his smartphone, and used it to consult a map website, trying to determine the best way to get from his current location to the address Lyle had given him.
From what he could tell it looked like a pretty complicated trip, so he took a pen and a note pad from his pocket, and jotted down every turn along with approximate mileage, then tore the paper out and put it in the breast pocket of his jacket where he could reach it easily.
Once that was finished, he crawled between the seats into the rear of the van and rummaged around, looking for the special crate (actually a repurposed fishing tackle box) where he kept all his drugs.
He found it near the very back, underneath a laundry bag full of old Traveler reference books, then opened it up, and examined his selection of narcotics, trying to decide what would work best as a sedative for the girl, if it came to that.
He had a pretty varied selection of mood altering substances: a lot of it was earthy, all-natural stuff—mushrooms, teas, things you could smoke in a pipe…
But he also had a good selection of harder stuff—synthetic chemicals in both pill and liquid form, intended to help bring about certain mystical states.
He didn’t have anything specifically designed to put somebody under, but he had several things that would work well enough if given in sufficient dosage.
Ultimately, he decided on a powerful substance that was sometimes used as an anesthetic for surgery in certain experimental hospital settings, and set about preparing a syringe.
He briefly debated whether or not to use an extra-large dose—being linked up to something as powerful as a dragon could potentially make someone very resistant to drugs, or at least it seemed likely that it might—but finally decided to err on the safe side and calibrate it for a normal woman of her size.
Even if it didn’t manage to knock her out, hopefully it would at least calm her down a little.
Or better yet, maybe I won’t need it at all.
It never hurt to be optimistic.
He put the syringe in his pocket with a little safety cap over the needle to keep it from stabbing through the cloth, thinking as he did so that it wouldn’t be any fun trying to remove the fiddly little thing in the heat of the moment while grappling with a crazed beast-woman.
What I need, he thought, is one of those dart guns that the park rangers use on bears and such… Or even better, some of that fancy knockout aerosol spray that the special forces people use. I bet Enid could get me something like that if I asked her.
He would have to remember to mention it to her later.
- - -
He’d only been back on the road for 15 minutes or thereabouts when he realized he’d already missed a turn, and then it took another quarter of an hour to retrace his steps and figure out where he went wrong.
When he finally got back on track, he soon found himself bouncing down a narrow dirt road in a region dominated by dark woods and farmland.
He imagined it was probably lovely country in the daytime, but at night the place was rather lonely seeming, and the way the trees crowded up against the road, blocking even the slightest hint of moonlight, caused paranoid thoughts to dance around in his head.
When his mileage marker told him he was nearing his destination, he eased off the gas so he could stop in front of every house he passed (there weren’t many) and examine their shapes in the dark, comparing them to his memory of the farmhouse the girl had been standing in front of during her miraculous appearance outside Joe’s place.
He drove two more miles, and passed four houses.
None of them looked quite right, but the more he thought about it, the more he had to admit to himself that he really hadn’t been paying that much attention when he saw the place before. After the fourth house, a pessimistic certainty that he must’ve already missed it started to plague him, and he almost decided to turn around and check.
Then he came upon a house on the left side of the road with lights blazing from all the windows. There was no exterior lighting, so it was hard to make out many details, but the outline of the roof against the clear night sky struck an immediate chord in his memory.
Still, he wasn’t certain he’d found the right place until he turned into the driveway and saw the familiar front porch in the illumination of his headlights.
There was a small car parked there (with a badly damaged hood, he noted absently) and the lights glowing within made it seem likely that someone was home.
Hopefully it’s her and hopefully she’s fine.
He turned off the engine, and got out of the van.
The woods were full of chirping crickets, so loud they drowned out every other sound. He could barely hear his own breathing.
He started toward the house, walking through grass that badly needed mowing, and mounted the porch steps, feeling vaguely uneasy as he approached the front door, like he ought to be holding his gun.
Instead of knocking right away, he glanced behind himself at the yard, trying to spot the cause of his unease, but there was nothing obvious, so he turned his attention back to the door, overcame his hesitation, and knocked.
Or, rather, he tried to knock. But when his fist hit the wood, it didn’t encounter the expected amount of resistance. Instead, the door creaked open a few inches.
A quick glance down revealed the reason why: the knob had been twisted like a pretzel.
This, naturally, caused his feeling of unease to worsen a bit, and he responded by taking his gun out before bursting into the room.
The first thing he saw inside was red: streaks and smears everywhere, on everything, as if someone had taken a can of spray paint and held down the button while dancing around the room in a mad frenzy.
And there was also a smell—a familiar, coppery odor that told him for sure that the red stuff all over the place was blood, mixed with the damp, soapy tang of steaming innards, and the rankness of burst intestines.
It was the smell of a slaughterhouse.
Then he saw the body parts in the floor—a torso here, a head there, arms, legs—all in a neat little stack on the rug in the center of the living room. One of the heads had been placed so that the face looked up at him, almost as if to greet him. It was a man’s face, bearded, the lips drawn down and frozen in a scowl, eyes staring blankly.
At first he was so overwhelmed by the grisly scene that all his faculties of comprehension fled, and the only thing he could feel was a vague sort of confusion.
But his body understood what he was seeing, and responded by making his knees go weak, and his stomach heave.
Finally he had to close his eyes to protect himself from the horror of it.
Then he made himself open them, made himself think, and he started to notice the finer details.
For instance: the number of parts made it clear that he was looking at the remains of several men—anywhere from three to seven. And it seemed likely that they had been private security people, similar to the group that had tried to capture him in Arizona. Certainly the gear looked about the same from what he could tell.
He noticed a pistol lying next to the pile of bodies—a Beretta that had been twisted, much like the doorknob outside.
From the incredible blood spray, the slaughter had clearly happened right here, and had been done very neatly. There was no real sign of a struggle. None of the furniture had been knocked over, and all the photographs on the walls were still intact.
He also noticed, as he examined the walls, that most of the photos included the young woman he’d come here looking for: as a little girl on a tire swing with a popsicle in hand, dressed as a cheerleader standing next to a serious-looking blond woman (presumably her mother), sitting on a rock by a river with a group of kids at summer camp, underneath a Christmas tree holding a Nin
tendo Gamecube video game system, still in its colorful packaging.
At least I have the right house, he thought.
A few moments later, everything started going dim.
His first thought was that he must be fainting, but as he reflected on his own internal condition, he realized that he didn’t feel dizzy or anything, and despite a certain weakness that had overtaken him, he didn’t feel like he was about to fall over anytime soon, so it probably wasn’t fainting after all.
And if it wasn’t a prelude to unconsciousness, that left only one other possibility: it must be real.
Within three seconds, enough of the light had fled that he couldn’t even make out vague shapes in the room, and that was when he decided it was time to get the hell out of there, but when he whirled back towards the door, somehow he managed to turn in the wrong direction—for some reason he couldn’t tell left from right or up from down. It was like standing in outer space.
Then something hot and wet and hard as stone seized his wrist in a grip with monstrous strength.
He fired his gun blindly, but if he hit the thing that held him, it mustn’t have done any real damage, because the grip didn’t loosen, and before he knew it, the gun had been wrenched from his hand.
He tried with all his might to pull away, but it was as if he were a little child in the hands of a grown man. His assailant pulled him closer, gripped him under his arms, lifted him off the ground high enough to bang his head into the ceiling, and threw him.
For a moment he was flying through the air and then he hit something—presumably the opposite wall—hard enough to knock his breath out. After that he plummeted, eventually landing on something soft. The couch? A small mercy, I suppose.
He lay there in the darkness, trying to get his breath back, and while he did so, the light returned, very suddenly, like it had never been gone at all.
The DARK Trilogy: Titan's Song Chronicles Volume 1 (Books 1 - 3) Page 23
